My Fair Lady

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                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two Japanese-Americans.  Did they have to have known you at all?  Did they?  As it turned out, two weeks.  Did they know you?  Your friends.  Or not? "

     "They were trying to be helpful."

     "Not glib?"

     "They were trying to be helpful.  He is a lawyer.  Highly successful.  They like him.  It was for him, too.  He was looking for someone too.  Most are already married.  It seemed like good fortune."

     "Little Benny."     

     He can hear her gasp on the tape, he knows she has covered her mouth with her hand, he remembers that, her eyes wide, an actor's gesture of shock, and now comes her laughter, like water falling from pool to pool, or like glass breaking, a quality to it, not the sound, but the purity, the icy reserve, breaking apart, falling to pieces shard by tinkling shard.  The laugh encouraged bravery, it relished mischief.  It was ready to be shocked and delighted in it.  It invited one to take a chance.  It would be rewarded.  He had made her recite the beginnings of her affairs.  They had all begun precipitously.  She was always finally grabbed. 

     He is making her repeat a story in this tape.  He already knows it.  He is leading her towards one part of it.  He anticipates it now.  He did then.

     "You should have known, introducing himself that way.  Bernard might have been different.  Just what you might have needed for rescue.  So, not such good fortune.  Because..."

     "It was unsatisfactory."

     "Yes?"

     "It was not satisfactory."

     "Couldn't you say you were not satisfied?  Yes?  You were not satisfied."

     "I was not satisfied."

     "And why not?"

     "We have discussed this."

     "And you are still saying `it' was unsatisfactory, so I feel as if we haven't talked about it at all.  You knew from the beginning.  It was not a general malaise, didn't you?  Because you went to your apartment.  At that point you were still ready to give it a go, or maybe it was just easier or maybe you might show him a thing or two and your friends, and just maybe, who knows, maybe you'll get a surprise.  So, be complete, let's see what we turn up.  He is in your apartment."

     "He is in my apartment."

     "And?  Are the lights off?  Did you have drinks?  Tell me what you were wearing.  You have to make an effort.  The medications come in conjunction with an effort."

     "I wore a black dress.  We kissed right away.  Why else would I invite him in?  But he goes looking for a closet to hang his coat.  When his arms are caught in the sleeves-he tried shrugging it off both shoulders at once and I know he is too nervous if he is doing that. He is a highly successful lawyer, and the back of the coat is flopped over the two sleeves and he is pinned, he'll have to gyrate, and I kissed him then because I think I lost patience."

     "You were not touched, perhaps, by his nervousness?"

     "He looks stupid.  It's exasperating.  I don't want to see it anymore.  He's a monkey in that coat.  Ben-ny.   Ben-ny.   Why doesn't he know how to take off a coat?   He can't even put his arms around me.  He turned away.  He is embarrassed.  He is always going to be ashamed."

     "And you?"

     "I am not ashamed.  He is silly."

     "And that's when you touched him, wasn't it?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "What's he there for, anyway?"

     "Because nothing else is left.  No other reason by now for him to be there, so let's get it over with, or what?"

     "He's just silly.  Glum as a plum.  All night already I have listened to his serious talk.  Too boring.  I am tired of being humble daughter.  I don't want to hear one more word."

     "This will shut him up."

     "Oh, yes.  He still can't get his arms out of the coat.  I drop his pants down, too.  He has on boxer shorts.  Then I go to the bedroom."

     "You left him there with his pants around his ankles."

     "Let him show courage."

     "Did you think he would follow?"

     "Eventually."

     "You didn't care, already?"

     "I went to the bathroom to prepare."

     "But, you knew there was no point to it already.  You had..."

     "I had courage for us both.  Kicking him out would be rude.  I am a civilized woman.  He should learn to take off his coat and to not talk like a student.  He is a highly successful lawyer."

     "But, when you had him in your hand, you already knew this would not go on long."

     The gasp and laugh again. 

     "You would not have continued, even if you found other reasons.  No other reasons would have been sufficient to overcome that, (he hears himself cough, again, his throat had obviously become dry) aberration."

     "I treated him with courtesy."

     "He never knew.  But, you were firm.  You broke it off."

     Her laugh again. 

     "You had him in your hand.  Why didn't you?  Why did you drag things out?"

     "That would have been bad manners."

     "What did he do when you touched him?"

     "The man always becomes serious then.  He was concentrated."

     "You don't remember anything else, about him?"

     She laughed.

     "He moaned.  Men are very Gothic then."

     "He didn't say anything?  That you remember."

     "For once he did not say anything."

     "They do sometimes, don't they?"

     "Sometimes."

     "The first time?"

     "Sometimes."

     "You can't remember?"

     "I love you.  Gibberish."

     "Never anything you believe."

     "It is not the time to extract promises."

     "You've never known at that moment, this is different?  This one is special?"

     She laughed again.   

     His voice again, taut.  Reacting to her laugh.  She has swung away from what he wanted.  He is leading her back.

     "Maybe, you laugh when you become uncomfortable.  When you begin to see yourself in what you are doing.  That might be the place for our most valuable work.  Let's concentrate at that point.  We should try bringing to consciousness what you bury there.  We left him with his pants tangled around his ankles, a belittling situation for him to find himself in, but he doesn't just find himself there, you've put him there and yet all that has been skipped.  What is your part in this?  You undid his pants, you remember very well the result of what you did, enjoy it, I think, but don't take responsibility for it.  So, try again. "    

     "Try again?'

     "Exactly."

     "Again. Grr.  Too boring."

     "Avoidance.  From when you kissed him."

     "I did not kiss him."

     "He is taking off his coat."

     "I didn't kiss him for that.  He looks too stupid.  He has no manners.  He is unsophisticated."

     He remembers how she would stretch before she was forced into digging into these memories, or before she made them up for him.  She would sit up.  And she would do small calisthenics with her neck and shoulders to loosen them up.  It was a strange body language, ritualistic and probably adopted from her father, who walked about with rocks on his back to strengthen his heart.  She would roll her shoulders, and lean her head back and turn it side to side.  Then she would begin, looking at him at the head of the couch, testing the story, perhaps, before laying back down.  When he remembers the calisthenics, he remembers how incongruously mechanical they were in her body which was so completely female, not zaftig, but a body where the femaleness was spread evenly, where joints were rounded together and her skin, for all its want of bosom and haunch, was suffused with luxuriousness and seamless smoothness.  The arm rowing, the head swaying, she might have been a child imitating a man.  Maybe, a child called on to join an adult activity and following the whole ritual without knowing which parts were critical.

     "You didn't kiss him.  You grabbed him."

     "Ah.  Yes?  I did not grab him.  His stomach is sticking out.  Like a little boy.  I patted his stomach, he's got a little pot belly, I stuck a finger through his shirt, but he has his pants too high, covering his belly button.  He's going to put his coat back on?  Or what is he going to do?  So, I undid his belt.  He's in boxer underwear.  Hopeless."

     "The pants just drop off when you unfasten the belt?  You're running through this again.  Take more time."

     "Uh-huh.  Of course.  Of course, I had to unzip him.  Right?  Uh-huh.  Carefully, I don't want him to get caught.  I hold him inside so he will not get caught.  Push him down.  He is wearing tailored pants, if he goes to the courtroom he must wear these pants.  They have a button inside so the fly goes right down because the pants do not spread.  I have to unbutton that button, also.  Right?  Right.  He's peeking through the fly.  Sure.  I give it a pinch.  In fun.  It's not such a tragedy.  Let's go.  OK?"

     "You've skipped over your disappointment.  We know there was that.  But, then his feelings.  What did you notice?  He didn't say anything?"

     "Too fast.  I have to hold him down so the zipper will not bite him.  He does not want to go down.  I am firm about this for his own good.  I am responsible for his well-being.  I have him completely in my hand, too bad, but he must be nervous, so I squeeze him, maybe that's not just right, I just squeeze the end with two fingers, is that better?, or I can put my thumb below the glans, it's like a little hat, and I can press there, a...a, below the glans, and hold it around, or? Or, just squeeze it a little, just with my fingertips. Until he makes some noises, grumph, grumph, Mr. Attorney, maybe.  Maybe not.  I can hear him breathing.  Like he has been running and wants to keep quiet?"

     "No protest?  Maybe, you didn't notice.  One might expect, his pants at his ankles, some protest.  A word perhaps.  His hands are tied.  And then he's hobbled by the pants, and there is your competency, this is all happening without a hitch, so to speak.  Practiced routine, he's the unrehearsed element, as far as he can see.  He might protest that, being a push over so to speak.  A word.  One would expect it.  If you are truly engaged, you would likely remember him uttering the word.  Maybe, quite personal, or feeling that way, even if the word were not personnel at all. Just a word, but that instant, a plea. For the very reason nothing personnel can work, could possibly be understood, whether it was in his own language or in no language at all, not really able to be put into words, this plea to be taken personnel. And so he only has the one word which has to say all this and can't and really isn't a word at all when he says it, because he doesn't want you to hear it as you always have before, but only as it's coming from him, new, or very old, but out of him only and not some common currency.  If you were to carefully remember that time, if you had been more careful, I think you would remember that word."

     "If I was more careful. He said nothing."

     "Nothing?  Did he?  I don't think so.  It's hard for me to imagine him then believing in that nihilism.  I doubt he could have believed, just then, on his quick demise in your life.  He would be misinterpreting, thinking either he is irresistible, or at least touching in his awkwardness.  Not receiving the implied insult in your shop-lifting of this misplaced article.  I think instead, some totally inappropriate gravity.  Try to remember.  The tone should help you, it would have been as clangorous as the screams of someone deaf.  Think."

     "He didn't say anything."

    "I see, your construction before was artificial.  I missed that.  Theatrical even.  He said nothing.  Well, one of us certainly has been deaf this hour."

     "No. No. No. I have been listening."

     "Yes. Yes you have.  Just then you had it, didn't you?  I heard it.  You heard it at last.  You made it your own.  It was there but you didn't know it until it broke open in you, and then there it is, loud and clear, as if you had your ear to his heart.  "No, no, no".  His protest at being robbed of the chance of bringing to you a unique generosity, maybe we can name it charity, because at this moment of misinterpretation, he feels full enough that what he wishes to give has the size of unity sublime, soul mate, nothing less, and that is charity.  If one wished to carry this on, hearing that "no, no, no" as if he were still speaking it, entering into that suspended minute with him, I think we would see slipping away from him a chance to forgive himself forever the loathing which has kept him separate from his own heart.  Right then, I suspect, your being Japanese was like the closed door of a mirror suddenly opening and falling through into every answer ever asked."

     Silence during which the granulations in the air are recorded along with some relaying through the wooden desk of the sounds that strum through the ground.  Then,

     "I don't let him go.  No, I won't do this.  I hold him, oh, and he says, "no, no, no" but I am holding him, my hand is not so strong but for this I know it will be strong enough to be kind.  Very gentle, I remember, very sweet, it's good, very careful.  No need to worry, it's all right, OK, OK.  Oh. Oh. Oh."        

     Manny cringes when he listens to the tape of this session, shaking his head.  He has always been more interactive with his patients than is traditional in orthodox psychoanalysis, often interspersing sessions of free association on the couch with interpretive dialogues where he and the patient sit facing each other and evaluate the course of the treatment and reach agreements on progress and strategy.  But this herding of Matsui cannot be veiled as collaboration in treatment.  He can only spare himself by believing he had no choice himself, that he was more driven than driving and that the explanations he was brow-beating her with to force her compliance and which are so transparently rationalizations for an obsessive motive at the time were not understood by him.  But then...Certainly she knew.  He hears her designing her monologues to satisfy him, sometimes testing them word by word to see if they fit his obsession, tacking in mid-course to follow his lead.  And then this...tape after tape labeled Matsui which put on the machine turn out to have been erased or recorded over, the unbearable record of erotic pandering expunged.  Sometimes a fragment is left.  He must have erased them in wildly swinging moods, sometimes cold with icy resolve and other times in fits of agony, destroying the voice he regretted losing.  And Matsui, knowing the contract, familiar with it from her experiences with men and her ready objectification in their eyes, her ability to become an ideal form for them, dressing with ever increasing consistency for his pleasure, measuring his response until she knew without his ever having to say it that childish exhibitions of sexuality aroused him, innocently exposed chaste cotton underwear, coltish gestures and huge sighs of theatrical  exasperation, knowing the conditions under which she would continue getting her drugs.  

     Under cover of one tape labeled Matsui, a telephone conversation with Daniel, his son, when he left his wife some years back to become a jazz pianist.  Why recorded on the tape?  To make a record over this unbearable evidence that he had been a responsible father?  Aware of the text it was covering with every word spoken, he hears himself deliberate and concerned, altruistic, offering to pick his son up from the transient hotel he is staying at in Hartford and drive him home to his wife, offering as well to speak to her, smooth the waters, and accepting without protest Daniel's sarcastic provocations and accusations, accepting them with therapeutic or patriarchal patience.  "I thought it was cement glue.  OK, so that's the route-sniff that crap and drop the vocabulary.  I'd learn the blues. But that's semen stuck on the door.  These guys sit on the toilet and jerk off.  That's the blues and I can't do it. I'm calling you collect.  I'm going back to my room to jerk off with the covers up to my neck.  Too much romance.  This is for us dad.  For you.  You'll see, we're gonna hug like men when this is over, without a word, two dumb animals with sad eyes, god damn it.  At last.  Cleaned out"...and then that spastic break when what was recorded over resumes... "Let's see you.  Start again.  Carefully.  In front of the mirror, begin there, see yourself."

     "O-o-oh. Oh.  I do that before I put on the dress. When I get out of the shower.  Before I put on my brassiere, black tonight."

     Her voice: From the start he had noticed a ventriloquistic quality in it.  She was away from the spot where the voice originated, in mood and vantage.  She had beautiful, full lips, and her mechanics of speaking were opulent.  Each syllable was molded through a kiss.  The result was a precision that was also lush, a topiary trimming.  Her voice was slightly mechanical, there even seemed to be rusty places on it, these were where anger abraded it into scratchy hoarseness, but for the most part it had the frictionless, flensed perfection of silver joints.  

   Her voice was hypnotic for him.  He was trained in hypnosis.  The voice is essential to the technique.  It should be seamless, without hesitations, preferably silky or felt-like, a little sing-song.  An incantation.  What the hypnotist creates is a voice without inflection or personality, without the ability to clash and arouse.  Freud said the dream functions to keep the sleeper asleep. That was the voice desired.  Only audible to an inner ear, the sable echo of one's own inner voice. 

     What would sex be like for her?  There would be passion, not emotion or feeling, these would seem mere fretwork compared to the rescue of a soul-a weight that severe and perilous. But, temperance. Not reserve, but an ordained futility.  At the very moment of recovery, of solid arrival: Futility.  An instant fading.  What would he feel through his arms?  A shocking lightness, her arrival when completed already including her withdrawal.  No sooner would she surely be in her lover's arms than he would feel the imported emptiness, the echoless stillness accompanying her return: The substance of her dreamless soul.   Without residue of gratitude or recognition for him.   And in most cases this was all that he would sense.  But for some, some few, given the endless time to see without being scrutinized by her pure blank stare-he might see the greater alienation from experience and affection and warmth and memory and terror, and even see as well her acclimation to those states of non-self from where she had just returned. 

     One lover in ten, perhaps, would know the chill, so immediate to him, was final and infinite.  He would know it for that brief time before he was captured again.  While beholding her in a catastrophe as great as birth or death, only the fatal proximity to such larger event pushing him outside of the act for brief moments to actually behold her apart before her instinctual sexual assaying noted his distance and took him in again, took him absolutely: The inclusion of the male to his very fiber, to his all, and in that all, the blank, frozen awe at futures begun and ended here and now and beyond.  Only briefly might he witness her aloft or buried.  How would this look to him, this fusion of opposites? A trembling quietude he could not interpret?  A humming in her he could feel, shivers and tremors, nearness to a density that might sink him like an anvil, but which embraced her?  No flailing, no writhing, no protest or pain or drama in her, no space left outside the grip on her for these things to occupy.  He could only guess at the distinction between burial and flight as she passed through the absolute deeps...seeing the angelic torpor and disinterest of the creature aloft over the fathomless: Her ecstasy without rapture, that erasure of emptiness inside itself that was her sought for release, this dissolution of soul into its origins and end in vacuum. 

     Before she required him again  ("Several ways to remind the man if his mind is wandering"), and Manny had her enumerate because he required from her grace and mastery, it was around these that his hope centered, in his transparent possession of her sexual genius, her instrumentality, out of which she had already been removed. 

     She deteriorated with the continued use of medications.    She said she was suicidal and the drugs were all that were keeping her alive.  He thought it likely that she threatened suicide to get the drugs.  She had the strategies of an addict.  She began speaking like a junkie, long pauses in which it seemed the machinery of the brain had simply stopped or as if she had forgotten what she was saying or could no longer make sense of language.  She blanked out.  Once, her silences had impressed him; they were evidence of this mastery of hers, her lack of excitement and her assurance, or the absolutism at her center.  Now, stupidities echoed from the dead space, as if he were overhearing the testimonials of ex-alcoholics and addicts from a twelve step program, as if one of those bare rooms with the circle of folding chairs had been implanted in her breast.  She repeated the cant she heard from her friends who by this time, it appeared, had streamlined the chore of talking to her into a corner man's spurring of will. 

     Her descent was a relief to him, at first.  He was sure he had fallen out of love with her.  Because of the drugs it was probably too late for him ever to actually be a good therapist for her, but at least he was no longer acting out of repressed desire. After all, she bored him.  She even disgusted him.  But then, the disgust became exciting.  It made him the slightest bit drunk, gave him a buzz.  Her abused body permitted him a sloppy exuberance.  He need not be so careful.  His feelings were not tangled any more.  Her beauty had made him delicate or deferential or petulant, at times.  Now, he was aroused and fascinated by the dandruff and psoriasis she developed, by the intimacy seeing them gave to him.  Dry white spittle lodged at the corners of her mouth.

     He sat beside her on the couch, she had begun surrendering to slovenly sobs, two ribbons of glistening mucous ran from her nose.  He put an arm around her and comforted her.  Her sobs were a chugging labor.  He stroked her hair.  It was coarser than he expected.  She seemed pregnant, as abducted by the mundane as a pregnant woman, and like a pregnant woman afflicted and somehow disposed of and despised, trapped in a form which seemed punished and benighted.  She was not pregnant, he did not feel towards her what he felt for a pregnant woman, but there were more than inklings of it.  He looked at her larded thighs, naked because her tights no longer fit.  They would slog and trudge.  He had the lover's feeling of being dragged along into earthy tasks, of getting hitched to the plow.  He reveled in this loss of aesthetics.  His ethical sense, even his moral sense, lapsed in this squalor.  He had never liked the denning part of marriage with Florence, the plowed earth musk of dirty diapers and the filling of the apartment with female flesh, its emissions and diurnal rhythms.  But, now he could enjoy a domestic seediness.  He patted her thigh, its nakedness was no longer luminous.  She was part of the soiled world.  He squeezed her flaccid arm, her head lolled onto his shoulder.

     "Take some simple steps.  It wouldn't hurt to spend a day cleaning your apartment.  And doing a wash.  Odors cling to clothes."

     "I can't wear any of my clothes anymore.  Just these."  

     She stuck out her tongue, a white film adhered to it. 

     "Hygiene is important.  There's no exemption.  It's unfortunate, being ill should be enough, but the clock is still ticking.  At middle age the body's chemistry begins to change.  It's noticeable.  For poets, artists, martyrs, unless they're saints."

     Her eyes sometimes rolled back in her head like a doll's.  Their heaviness had seemed part of the erotic anomie he imagined for her, weighted by witness and verdict.  By the end, they seemed dumb as oxen's.  He sat next to her on the couch at the end of the session, not every session, just a few, enough to make it seem normal to him, until it did, and he could do it without stage fright, plop down next to her like she was a passenger on a bus, with as little regard, holding her prescription in one hand.  Times for refills were the opportunities he picked to sit beside her, holding the paper out of her reach, not deliberately, but as if it was demeaning for him to deal with, until she had to ask for it, which she could not do right away, not until he had perhaps stroked her hair, lifting it at last off the nape and brushing the chaste saddle of skin that stretched across the string of vertebrae, and then she would remind him, and he would look startled, as if she had said something impolite, as if the whole topic was, or she had not been listening, as if the paper in his hand was un-pocketed change she was asking for. 

     Later, over the years since her suicide, he realizes something else had evolved in him during her rapid decline.  Rather than falling out of love with her a physical commiseration had grown in him.  He did not recognize it at the time, it seemed to him that all he did was abuse her abandoned body, but later, listening to the tapes, he found that the opportunities he had taken to touch her, to sit close enough to her to insure that her opiated body would lean heavily against him, now made him physically miss her, to miss that real weight, even the remembered stale and chemical odors that hung about her.  Her drugged state had allowed him to gain an intimacy with her, and losing that intimacy turned out to be the greatest part of his grief, while the loss of her beauty and with it his cursed intoxication with her has faded in importance.  At the time her beauty had seemed an emblem of a governing order to the world based on cruelty and power, and when it paled it seemed a vindication of this principal's ruthless precedence over life, and now he cannot make that seem significant compared to her single death. 

     She had reported an early attempt at suicide.  It was too stylized to have been sincere; she had been at an age of artistic excess, twenty years ago, her expectations were lyrical, a state of temper he did not see her as capable of anymore.  Besides, she had only gone through the preparations: Ran the bath water, laid the safety razor on the edge, climbed into the tub, and toyed with the hallucinogenic changes her resolution had brought to everything she saw or thought.  Finally, her boyfriend at the time barged in to use the toilet and broke the spell.  She had to tell him what had been going on or he would never have noticed, and it was immediately impossible for her to recapture the insouciant nostalgia she had been feeling toward life, which could have been proof of her actual nearness to the act.  All she had left was a simple arithmetic to measure her proximity, the half hour or so the clock had parsed off before her boyfriend's entrance.  Had her will already been weakening, was that already too long a hesitation?  Or too short a period to balance against other gaps of boredom and passive aggression that were part of a normal day?   

     She reported to Manny that during the week since her last appointment she had spent a night sharpening a knife.  Her somewhat boyfriend was visiting. Manny had heard of him before.  They had not been able to decide on a title for him.  They never had sex, the medicines had effectively spaded her, but he was available for moral support at any time.  He was relieved, Manny thought by the lessor culpability which came with no longer being her lover.  It seemed to Manny that his main goal at this time was to slip away on tip-toe with her still balanced upright, at least until he left the room.  He thought, too, that she used him for a straw dog for Manny and their therapeutic relationship.     

     "He doesn't want sex either.  He is much happier now that I'm a fat girl so he has a reason.  He's feeling much better.  He was a problematic performer, but so elegant and attentive when apologizing that I can't lose him.  He does errands.  He wants to act like we're married and don't have to fuck anymore, thank god.  He likes me better fat and ugly because he is so loyal now.  We're so boring.  We don't say anything anymore.  Since we don't sleep together he can be smug.  I don't dress for him.  I'm so fat now, and I see it excites him.  It was too competitive for him before, now he is doing me a big favor.  He wants to do favors and be superior.  He wants to please, maybe he needs a mommy.  We're married all right.  We're so boring together.  He's so pontifical.  He talks on and on.  What is he saying?  He wants to touch me now.  He's always patting me like a buddy, every chance he gets.  Yack.  Yack.  Yack.  I'll be all right, he's saying.  I've got to be strong.  Don't give up.  What did he tell me once?  I have too many secrets because my parents were in an internment camp.  I'm trying too hard to not be Japanese.  I'm ashamed. Like all survivors.  I should be Japanese.  What's he mean?  He wants to touch me now that it would be such a favor and he would be my savior.  He's getting horny.  In our trashy life he can be horny.  He feels like a prince down there.  Japanese.  I've had Jewish boy friends.  They all want me to be the first Jew.  They always think everybody else is in the Golden Age while they're too smart to get in.  He thinks he looks Eurasian.  From the Middle East, but the Japanese are more perfect.  I showed him Japanese, all night I sharpened the knife and he comes in and out of the kitchen sputtering and can't leave because he doesn't know who the knife is for.  He should see himself then.  He's got no place with his Japanese Medea, ah, ah, ah, ah, flapping his arms, caw, caw, caw."

     Listening to this uncommon harangue by her, usually she sat stonily or sniveled, Manny thought the contemplation of suicide had had its usual tonic effect, clearing the mind and restoring pride of purpose, and thought it had already served and was not really a threat anymore, and that furthermore it had allowed her to take a shot at him; since he had not prevented her from swerving so close to the edge she had in effect out-argued or out-smarted and eluded him.   

     And then, on his watch, she tried again, and it was only the intervention of her friends that saved her.  They grew uneasy whenever she lingered in a bathroom in a restaurant.  She was so fixated on suicide, talking of nothing else, that she had lost a woman's privilege to dawdle over her toilette while the rest of the table hangs fire, and when she failed to answer her telephone on a morning when she should have been awake for work-she was maniacal about schedules, she seemed to have lost any memory of their context or reason, but depended on rolling along in their ruts-they roused the super to open her door with a key.      

     She was laying on the bed, dressed for a chilly evening's stroll in pants and cashmere sweater, whether out of modesty or a consideration for death's chill approach they wondered, and felt guilty for wondering since it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking standing over her body.  And more bitchily still, noticing that she had on her black boots, which tipped the balance to image and vanity.

     Her friends on guard that day were a couple.  The vigil rotated, friends spelling friends.  Manny got the report from the husband who had met Matsui through his wife.  He was handling her temporal affairs one of which was informing the shrink, while his wife visited Matsui at the clinic where a man would be a sullen encumbrance.  The consensus was that Manny was to blame and this fellow plowed into Manny over the phone with the gusto which comes with relief.  He had been chaffing under the rule of righteously sad women finally completely in their element. 

     Manny waited out his initial exuberance, and bogged him down in documenting what might be called medical details or psychological clues, all of them useless and tedious, but not incidentally forcing the guy to confess his morbid curiosity and a spiking of arousal the body in its state of sedated debauchery had caused him.  And confess, too, the frenzied gossip they were all enjoying in the aftermath of the attempt. Its religious timbre and invigorated purpose.  And a sense all of them had gained of being rare and imperiled and wiser.         

     She had left neat and resolved, with her house dusted and polished, dishes washed and stacked in their cabinets, clothes folded in their drawers, in that state of mature detachment a suicide often gains at the end, and she was dragged back as a frazzled ruin and thrown in with other wrecks to endure a two week remedial course in how to live normally. 

     Manny did not visit her at the clinic.  She was under the care of the house rehabilitation experts.  The details of the perverse turn his therapy had taken would not be revealed or believed.  The testimony of suicides is disregarded: Their interpretations have failed the most basic test of keeping them alive.  A tacit superiority is felt towards them.  Insincerity and manipulation is assumed.  The treatments pointedly ignore or drown out in tuneless rhetoric any suggestion that the suicide may have opposed the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, that he might have shown gallantry and sober courage or conclusive judgement or had turned a cold eye on life and death.  They were treated as victims of their emotions with crippled intelligence.  In this institution of sandbox group therapy, her lost sessions with Manny had the aspect of romance, and she phoned out to him when she could and attacked and plead like an ex-lover. 

     Wasn't he going to call her?  He wasn't going to just abandon her, was he?  How could he?  He couldn't just run away.  Look what he had done.  He couldn't just pretend he didn't know.  Why didn't he call?  Didn't he have a medical responsibility?  Did she embarrass him now?  And then: She was losing weight. 

     He could hear the television in the background.  The telephone was in the common room.  She had a sneering mockery in her voice then, she asked him what color nightgowns he preferred.  Someone else was waiting to use the phone, perhaps to call their own shrink, he could sense she was talking for the other person to hear as well.  She had brought her black one.  Was that OK? 

     He shouldn't blame himself.  Is that what kept him from calling?  And if he was blaming himself, was this handling it?  This was hardly the time.  She was the issue.  She was in no shape to take care of him.  Did he have to hear he was not to blame?  Would that make a difference?  Well then, he was not to blame.  Did he feel better, could she talk now?  Would he listen?  Or would he now stop even taking her calls?   Now that he was off the hook?  He could go back to his world.  A thousand pardons.  Forgive the intrusion.  Psychiatrists do quite well.  Their patients are a necessary inconvenience, otherwise what a wonderful world they live in.  Did he own any impressionists?  She preferred Cezanne.  The others were frivolous compared.  Did he have a summer place, in Buck's county maybe?  She bet he was a good driver.  She concurred with his selection of a BMW, no, she really wouldn't hear an alternative.  She simply wouldn't, she would put her hands over her ears before she would listen to such talk.  Did he think they should re-institute the scarlet letter?  These incarcerations flew by so fast, and then none the wiser.  All that wasted effort.  She would not be watching soap operas upon her dismissal and she doubted very much that her new friends would last.  The food was awful, the decor non-existent.  She might escape improvement altogether, unless she were reminded by a branding of some sort.  Otherwise she might be quite inconspicuous.  But, really, they were taught to be, but it was such a dilemma, suppressing pride but not leaving one so anonymous that one forgot one's responsibility and the privilege of being alive, about which one was already so nonchalant.

     She called him out of the habit of life. She just wanted to make it through these two weeks and be released, but she could not remain aloof.  She fell victim to the habits and reflexes of this redundant life.

     She knew what she was considered by looking at those stored in this place with her.  She did not have enough endurance to do anything but resist the immediate implications.  She was not planning on a future, she did not believe in a substance inside of this farce, a reason to endure the sham because of a promise of joy or love or cure.  The dimensions were fixed.  Her voice was cold with rage.  She was locked in with boring and ugly company as a punishment for failure.  He thought she was angry too because she had not been angry when she ended her life before, and she thought she was succumbing to debasement and her present anger, a low level of consciousness, was the proof.  She would be stuck in the coils of insult and retribution, constantly balancing the books, never clear of debt and finished with it as she had been before. 

     He did not know she was going to kill herself within three weeks.  She may have thought from the beginning that she had simply been interrupted and must wait this out, or she may have conceived it again as the only escape, the only privacy she had left, the only secret that held interest for her.  Maybe.  He believed, though, that it was not on her mind then, that the situation was too endlessly petty to earn escape, and suicide as it had been transcribed into pidgin in the group sessions was too enfeebled to survive outside the walls of this institution.   Suicide was able to be measured here, and it was smaller than the tedium and vandalizing boredom.  Suicide would not exceed the reach of deadened lives; it could not reach death, not anymore, and what death it might succeed in, had been polluted unto dismal. 

     She was on the public phone.  She did not whisper, everything she said was part of the continuum of the place.  The clinic had no limits; she expected him to already be privy to the narrative, plunged in it as they all were.  As soon as he picked up the phone he heard, "She's coming back right now.  She'll come right over here.  She's going to want to know your name.  I'm not going to tell her.  SSh.  Don't say anything.  She never combs her hair.  Deliberately, she doesn't want to get thrown out of here.  Here she is."   A commotion on the other side.  "None of your beeswax.  She's going to take the phone.  Don't breathe a word."

     A woman's beefy, threatening voice, full of phlegm but still brittle:  "You're not doing her any good.  You didn't, you know.  And now you're not giving her a chance to get better.  Maybe, you're afraid she will, then where would you be?  You should have some conscience, give her a chance.  She's supposed to concentrate on her work here and all you're doing is letting her continue with her lies.  It didn't work.  Won't you be satisfied till she's dead?  This is serious you know.  She tried to kill herself, she'd be dead if it was just for you.  Who do you think you are, risking her like this?  You just really don't give a shit, do you?  Me. Me. Me.  She's in trouble.  She looks like shit.  You wrung your little sweetheart almost clean out.  She's a fat faced mama san, don't you think maybe you've done enough already?  I'm sure she was just a pretty little wisp of a girl once upon a time, but she's a washed out dishrag now, and she better start facing it or she's never going to be anybody's heart throb again, least of all you, you self-righteous jerk.  Go ahead, it's your funeral."  

     Then Matsui's voice again:  "She's going over to sit on the chair and stare at me until I hang up the phone.  Then she'll follow me around.  She's in my group.  She's decided she can save my life.  She says I'm not facing who I am and if I don't I'll just kill myself again.  She's in and out of here all the time.  She's a funny color from the meds.  I can't get away, she thinks we're sisters. There's no privacy here.  I've got the wrong nightgown, too revealing.  If I called my super, do you think he could bring me my old Mother Hubbard flannel one.  He'd have no trouble finding it in my drawer, everything else is satin and silk".

     And then again,

     "It's TV time now.  Everybody is sitting around watching TV.  I never realized what shows they have on in the day.  There's one where people talk truth to the people who have hurt them in life, and then they hit them.  That's very popular here.  We're not well, so we're not allowed to hit one another, but we're anxious to get out where we can participate.  Day time TV is very generous to the ugly, I don't remember seeing them at night, anyway, not in serious roles.  We're all very grateful.  Someone said he thinks the worm is turning and the dogs will soon have their day.  Another thing to look forward to.  Uh-oh, she was not so absorbed as I thought.  I know she'll want to say a few words to you, just look at it as local color.  A weird yellowish-grey, puce I think.  Oh, everybody's wearing it."

     Again, the morning voice of the woman in her group, this time sinisterly sweet.

     "Is it you again, you patient ear.  She has a special place in her heart for you and we've all got to treat you better because she's so dear to us.  She keeps trying to withdraw from us, that's really the problem, and we love her so much.  The right word from you might help.  I've told her we're her family now, but she rejects us.  She thinks you're going to take her back.  She does.  I don't even think she remembers what that was.  But, a word from you now could save her so much pain later on.  Just tell her that suicidal Orientals are not your cup of tea.  Tell her how you always wanted a silky little lotus blossom sitting on your lap, and it just won't work with a bone crushing fat ass.  That would be so kind of you.  You know how you are, boychick, when you've run out of patience.  Remind her what it'll be when you're tired of being good."                                    She had called him at his office and at home.  Patients had this number for emergencies.  He had an answering machine.  When he heard her voice he would pick up the receiver.  He had recorded some of these calls.  She had killed herself a week after the last one.  He had called her when she was released from the clinic.  She had been home for a day. 

     "It's Doctor Mahler.  How are you?"

     "What?  I don't feel like talking.  I have to clean up.  I'm still cleaning up.  I don't feel like talking.  I have to do a lot of cleaning.  I don't want to talk here.  I don't want to talk to you here.  I have to clean this place up."

     "Of course.  We can talk later.  If you should feel like it.  I hope you're feeling better."

     "We can talk later.  Better later."

     They never spoke again. 

     She was more efficient this time.  She probably did not have enough pills remaining to do the job on their own, and she had learned that she had only so much time alone before an unanswered telephone would arouse suspicion.  This time she took enough pills to put her to sleep and tied a plastic bag over her head so she would suffocate in her sleep. 

     She did not leave a note, she hadn’t the first time either,but this time she had laid several books on Zen Buddhism on the bed near her, with a few paper markers between the pages.  To justify herself?  To relieve her friends of guilt over her aloneness by implying she had belief of something at the end or that, at least, she was too deluded to have really suffered?  Or, were the passages marked simply better written than she thought herself able to do at the time?  Manny thought a note must be difficult to reconcile with the act. While writing it the usual aggravating voices of vanity and hypocrisy would resume their twaddle, insulting resolve.  Few were left in this culture who might ever be certain of the unanimity of their decisions. 

     These tapes were as close to a voice from the grave as she was going to leave.  He could not follow her last steps, she might have reported them to him after the first time, but typically, those rescued after proving their last full measure of devotion had nothing revelatory to say; perhaps, like those spit back by the sea, their devotion had had the wrong flavor and they were not permitted entrance into the green gardens where mermaids sing.  

     But her physical presence which has materialized on listening to these tapes presses too closely into him to be ceded without a word to the blankness following her last words to him, and he cannot release this presence into vanishing dream stuff without putting some message on the long hour of tape that was never used. "We can talk later.  Better later", and he presses the record button to cover over that chasm:

     "A woman told me this story.  She was woken up by the telephone.  Very late.  After two in the morning.  `Elaine?  It's Terrance.'  Terance had died twenty years ago.  On stage.  He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert.  He had made love with every French professor he had had.  She was one of them.  `Terrance.  It's nice to hear from you.  How are things over there?' she asked.  He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out.  It had snuck up on him.  He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall.  All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes.  He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines.  A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away.  `I'm so happy for you, Terrance.  It sounds beautiful.  Blue skies.  I'm so relieved, I've stopped believing that was possible.  I hardly seem to care much about them here.  I didn't think I'd get that back.  Oh, I hope so, I hope I didn't put if off too long.'  He answered, `You didn't.  We didn't.  The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.'  `What a surprise.  I've grown resigned.  I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway.  So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest.  Grey clouds sounded much more like it.  Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky.  We all miss you.'  `But, that's why I called.  I miss you.  I think it was the sun coming back.  I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were.  For me.  You could be.  You're so generous.  You can't help it.  I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing.  A light on everything, I was thinking, and you came to mind.  You know, the sun was warming my pants, I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up.  What are you wearing?'  `Terrance.  You mustn't think that way.  Not there.  It's too sad.  It's awful.  To still think that way.  They should never have stopped the rain.  I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame.  It must be a dream.  We must be allowed to forget.  I'll pray for you.  I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back.  And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me.  It's so unseemly of me.  You're just a boy.  And I miss you.  So, unfair.  I've got to let you go.  But, it's harder now than it was before.  It's all I have left.  It's got to be a sin to summon the dead.  But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you.  Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now.  You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone.  Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.'

     Well, it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but Terrance on sabbatical in Florence, separated by seven hours and a few months of blessed silence after a year of venomous spiffs.  Terrance with the skinny legs and bad breath.  That Terrance, the one whose co-habitation inside the name of the musician had struck her as grotesque, and who then served as one of those messengers in dreams who always seem to be wearing disguises.  I've told you the story.It did happen, I've added to it, it scared her.  She was brave conversing with the dead when she was still groggy, she just continued the conversation in the spell of dreaming when such things can seem normal.  But she became superstitious when repeating it to me and stopped abruptly, afraid we were being overheard.  I told it to you to remind you how the living always have an ear cocked to the dead.  We shouldn't think it is illicit, or ominous.  Please, it's a thing of sunny days.  You've probably forgotten, but we have always heard your dead voices whispering through the leaves, even in sunlight. 

     Do you have a spare moment?  You know, it is not that far from my office to the East River.  When I get the chance, I walk there.  There's a park around Gracie Mansion.  I walk through it.  I'd like you to come along.  Do you like pigeons?  Everybody is obligated not to.  I've always liked them.  Maybe, you would understand that more.  They live here as if we don't, that might seem prescient to you.  Maybe, you see them more clearly than you see us.  Especially when they fly.  Maybe, you're fooled into thinking they belong with you.  When I was a kid I spent too much time alone.  You are familiar to me.  I think we should be on these terms, I imagine you along with me.  It's quite natural to us.  Your absence, it's familiar to me, from empty mirrors.  I could enter the space where my shadow lived.  And look out.   Did you know, Matsui, that beauty carries that space inside it?  Doesn't that change everything between us?  Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them?  Did you hear them more personally?  Did you?  If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you?  I don't believe you can hear any of this, by now you're dust.  Am I here to say good-bye at last?  But, it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with, that the rest of us learn  we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled  will be eternal.  There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."

     He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.  

     He nodded off.  A minute later he wakes, saying what?  What?  into the dark room.  He cannot remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhowette with outflung arms cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him, and he does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.                  

                    

 

       

                                         

 

     

  

 

                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two Japanese-Americans.  Did they have to have known you at all?  Did they?  As it turned out, two weeks.  Did they know you?  Your friends.  Or not? "

     "They were trying to be helpful."

     "Not glib?"

     "They were trying to be helpful.  He is a lawyer.  Highly successful.  They like him.  It was for him, too.  He was looking for someone too.  Most are already married.  It seemed like good fortune."

     "Little Benny."     

     He can hear her gasp on the tape, he knows she has covered her mouth with her hand, he remembers that, her eyes wide, an actor's gesture of shock, and now comes her laughter, like water falling from pool to pool, or like glass breaking, a quality to it, not the sound, but the purity, the icy reserve, breaking apart, falling to pieces shard by tinkling shard.  The laugh encouraged bravery, it relished mischief.  It was ready to be shocked and delighted in it.  It invited one to take a chance.  It would be rewarded.  He had made her recite the beginnings of her affairs.  They had all begun precipitously.  She was always finally grabbed. 

     He is making her repeat a story in this tape.  He already knows it.  He is leading her towards one part of it.  He anticipates it now.  He did then.

     "You should have known, introducing himself that way.  Bernard might have been different.  Just what you might have needed for rescue.  So, not such good fortune.  Because..."

     "It was unsatisfactory."

     "Yes?"

     "It was not satisfactory."

     "Couldn't you say you were not satisfied?  Yes?  You were not satisfied."

     "I was not satisfied."

     "And why not?"

     "We have discussed this."

     "And you are still saying `it' was unsatisfactory, so I feel as if we haven't talked about it at all.  You knew from the beginning.  It was not a general malaise, didn't you?  Because you went to your apartment.  At that point you were still ready to give it a go, or maybe it was just easier or maybe you might show him a thing or two and your friends, and just maybe, who knows, maybe you'll get a surprise.  So, be complete, let's see what we turn up.  He is in your apartment."

     "He is in my apartment."

     "And?  Are the lights off?  Did you have drinks?  Tell me what you were wearing.  You have to make an effort.  The medications come in conjunction with an effort."

     "I wore a black dress.  We kissed right away.  Why else would I invite him in?  But he goes looking for a closet to hang his coat.  When his arms are caught in the sleeves-he tried shrugging it off both shoulders at once and I know he is too nervous if he is doing that. He is a highly successful lawyer, and the back of the coat is flopped over the two sleeves and he is pinned, he'll have to gyrate, and I kissed him then because I think I lost patience."

     "You were not touched, perhaps, by his nervousness?"

     "He looks stupid.  It's exasperating.  I don't want to see it anymore.  He's a monkey in that coat.  Ben-ny.   Ben-ny.   Why doesn't he know how to take off a coat?   He can't even put his arms around me.  He turned away.  He is embarrassed.  He is always going to be ashamed."

     "And you?"

     "I am not ashamed.  He is silly."

     "And that's when you touched him, wasn't it?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "What's he there for, anyway?"

     "Because nothing else is left.  No other reason by now for him to be there, so let's get it over with, or what?"

     "He's just silly.  Glum as a plum.  All night already I have listened to his serious talk.  Too boring.  I am tired of being humble daughter.  I don't want to hear one more word."

     "This will shut him up."

     "Oh, yes.  He still can't get his arms out of the coat.  I drop his pants down, too.  He has on boxer shorts.  Then I go to the bedroom."

     "You left him there with his pants around his ankles."

     "Let him show courage."

     "Did you think he would follow?"

     "Eventually."

     "You didn't care, already?"

     "I went to the bathroom to prepare."

     "But, you knew there was no point to it already.  You had..."

     "I had courage for us both.  Kicking him out would be rude.  I am a civilized woman.  He should learn to take off his coat and to not talk like a student.  He is a highly successful lawyer."

     "But, when you had him in your hand, you already knew this would not go on long."

     The gasp and laugh again. 

     "You would not have continued, even if you found other reasons.  No other reasons would have been sufficient to overcome that, (he hears himself cough, again, his throat had obviously become dry) aberration."

     "I treated him with courtesy."

     "He never knew.  But, you were firm.  You broke it off."

     Her laugh again. 

     "You had him in your hand.  Why didn't you?  Why did you drag things out?"

     "That would have been bad manners."

     "What did he do when you touched him?"

     "The man always becomes serious then.  He was concentrated."

     "You don't remember anything else, about him?"

     She laughed.

     "He moaned.  Men are very Gothic then."

     "He didn't say anything?  That you remember."

     "For once he did not say anything."

     "They do sometimes, don't they?"

     "Sometimes."

     "The first time?"

     "Sometimes."

     "You can't remember?"

     "I love you.  Gibberish."

     "Never anything you believe."

     "It is not the time to extract promises."

     "You've never known at that moment, this is different?  This one is special?"

     She laughed again.   

     His voice again, taut.  Reacting to her laugh.  She has swung away from what he wanted.  He is leading her back.

     "Maybe, you laugh when you become uncomfortable.  When you begin to see yourself in what you are doing.  That might be the place for our most valuable work.  Let's concentrate at that point.  We should try bringing to consciousness what you bury there.  We left him with his pants tangled around his ankles, a belittling situation for him to find himself in, but he doesn't just find himself there, you've put him there and yet all that has been skipped.  What is your part in this?  You undid his pants, you remember very well the result of what you did, enjoy it, I think, but don't take responsibility for it.  So, try again. "    

     "Try again?'

     "Exactly."

     "Again. Grr.  Too boring."

     "Avoidance.  From when you kissed him."

     "I did not kiss him."

     "He is taking off his coat."

     "I didn't kiss him for that.  He looks too stupid.  He has no manners.  He is unsophisticated."

     He remembers how she would stretch before she was forced into digging into these memories, or before she made them up for him.  She would sit up.  And she would do small calisthenics with her neck and shoulders to loosen them up.  It was a strange body language, ritualistic and probably adopted from her father, who walked about with rocks on his back to strengthen his heart.  She would roll her shoulders, and lean her head back and turn it side to side.  Then she would begin, looking at him at the head of the couch, testing the story, perhaps, before laying back down.  When he remembers the calisthenics, he remembers how incongruously mechanical they were in her body which was so completely female, not zaftig, but a body where the femaleness was spread evenly, where joints were rounded together and her skin, for all its want of bosom and haunch, was suffused with luxuriousness and seamless smoothness.  The arm rowing, the head swaying, she might have been a child imitating a man.  Maybe, a child called on to join an adult activity and following the whole ritual without knowing which parts were critical.

     "You didn't kiss him.  You grabbed him."

     "Ah.  Yes?  I did not grab him.  His stomach is sticking out.  Like a little boy.  I patted his stomach, he's got a little pot belly, I stuck a finger through his shirt, but he has his pants too high, covering his belly button.  He's going to put his coat back on?  Or what is he going to do?  So, I undid his belt.  He's in boxer underwear.  Hopeless."

     "The pants just drop off when you unfasten the belt?  You're running through this again.  Take more time."

     "Uh-huh.  Of course.  Of course, I had to unzip him.  Right?  Uh-huh.  Carefully, I don't want him to get caught.  I hold him inside so he will not get caught.  Push him down.  He is wearing tailored pants, if he goes to the courtroom he must wear these pants.  They have a button inside so the fly goes right down because the pants do not spread.  I have to unbutton that button, also.  Right?  Right.  He's peeking through the fly.  Sure.  I give it a pinch.  In fun.  It's not such a tragedy.  Let's go.  OK?"

     "You've skipped over your disappointment.  We know there was that.  But, then his feelings.  What did you notice?  He didn't say anything?"

     "Too fast.  I have to hold him down so the zipper will not bite him.  He does not want to go down.  I am firm about this for his own good.  I am responsible for his well-being.  I have him completely in my hand, too bad, but he must be nervous, so I squeeze him, maybe that's not just right, I just squeeze the end with two fingers, is that better?, or I can put my thumb below the glans, it's like a little hat, and I can press there, a...a, below the glans, and hold it around, or? Or, just squeeze it a little, just with my fingertips. Until he makes some noises, grumph, grumph, Mr. Attorney, maybe.  Maybe not.  I can hear him breathing.  Like he has been running and wants to keep quiet?"

     "No protest?  Maybe, you didn't notice.  One might expect, his pants at his ankles, some protest.  A word perhaps.  His hands are tied.  And then he's hobbled by the pants, and there is your competency, this is all happening without a hitch, so to speak.  Practiced routine, he's the unrehearsed element, as far as he can see.  He might protest that, being a push over so to speak.  A word.  One would expect it.  If you are truly engaged, you would likely remember him uttering the word.  Maybe, quite personal, or feeling that way, even if the word were not personnel at all. Just a word, but that instant, a plea. For the very reason nothing personnel can work, could possibly be understood, whether it was in his own language or in no language at all, not really able to be put into words, this plea to be taken personnel. And so he only has the one word which has to say all this and can't and really isn't a word at all when he says it, because he doesn't want you to hear it as you always have before, but only as it's coming from him, new, or very old, but out of him only and not some common currency.  If you were to carefully remember that time, if you had been more careful, I think you would remember that word."

     "If I was more careful. He said nothing."

     "Nothing?  Did he?  I don't think so.  It's hard for me to imagine him then believing in that nihilism.  I doubt he could have believed, just then, on his quick demise in your life.  He would be misinterpreting, thinking either he is irresistible, or at least touching in his awkwardness.  Not receiving the implied insult in your shop-lifting of this misplaced article.  I think instead, some totally inappropriate gravity.  Try to remember.  The tone should help you, it would have been as clangorous as the screams of someone deaf.  Think."

     "He didn't say anything."

    "I see, your construction before was artificial.  I missed that.  Theatrical even.  He said nothing.  Well, one of us certainly has been deaf this hour."

     "No. No. No. I have been listening."

     "Yes. Yes you have.  Just then you had it, didn't you?  I heard it.  You heard it at last.  You made it your own.  It was there but you didn't know it until it broke open in you, and then there it is, loud and clear, as if you had your ear to his heart.  "No, no, no".  His protest at being robbed of the chance of bringing to you a unique generosity, maybe we can name it charity, because at this moment of misinterpretation, he feels full enough that what he wishes to give has the size of unity sublime, soul mate, nothing less, and that is charity.  If one wished to carry this on, hearing that "no, no, no" as if he were still speaking it, entering into that suspended minute with him, I think we would see slipping away from him a chance to forgive himself forever the loathing which has kept him separate from his own heart.  Right then, I suspect, your being Japanese was like the closed door of a mirror suddenly opening and falling through into every answer ever asked."

     Silence during which the granulations in the air are recorded along with some relaying through the wooden desk of the sounds that strum through the ground.  Then,

     "I don't let him go.  No, I won't do this.  I hold him, oh, and he says, "no, no, no" but I am holding him, my hand is not so strong but for this I know it will be strong enough to be kind.  Very gentle, I remember, very sweet, it's good, very careful.  No need to worry, it's all right, OK, OK.  Oh. Oh. Oh."        

     Manny cringes when he listens to the tape of this session, shaking his head.  He has always been more interactive with his patients than is traditional in orthodox psychoanalysis, often interspersing sessions of free association on the couch with interpretive dialogues where he and the patient sit facing each other and evaluate the course of the treatment and reach agreements on progress and strategy.  But this herding of Matsui cannot be veiled as collaboration in treatment.  He can only spare himself by believing he had no choice himself, that he was more driven than driving and that the explanations he was brow-beating her with to force her compliance and which are so transparently rationalizations for an obsessive motive at the time were not understood by him.  But then...Certainly she knew.  He hears her designing her monologues to satisfy him, sometimes testing them word by word to see if they fit his obsession, tacking in mid-course to follow his lead.  And then this...tape after tape labeled Matsui which put on the machine turn out to have been erased or recorded over, the unbearable record of erotic pandering expunged.  Sometimes a fragment is left.  He must have erased them in wildly swinging moods, sometimes cold with icy resolve and other times in fits of agony, destroying the voice he regretted losing.  And Matsui, knowing the contract, familiar with it from her experiences with men and her ready objectification in their eyes, her ability to become an ideal form for them, dressing with ever increasing consistency for his pleasure, measuring his response until she knew without his ever having to say it that childish exhibitions of sexuality aroused him, innocently exposed chaste cotton underwear, coltish gestures and huge sighs of theatrical  exasperation, knowing the conditions under which she would continue getting her drugs.  

     Under cover of one tape labeled Matsui, a telephone conversation with Daniel, his son, when he left his wife some years back to become a jazz pianist.  Why recorded on the tape?  To make a record over this unbearable evidence that he had been a responsible father?  Aware of the text it was covering with every word spoken, he hears himself deliberate and concerned, altruistic, offering to pick his son up from the transient hotel he is staying at in Hartford and drive him home to his wife, offering as well to speak to her, smooth the waters, and accepting without protest Daniel's sarcastic provocations and accusations, accepting them with therapeutic or patriarchal patience.  "I thought it was cement glue.  OK, so that's the route-sniff that crap and drop the vocabulary.  I'd learn the blues. But that's semen stuck on the door.  These guys sit on the toilet and jerk off.  That's the blues and I can't do it. I'm calling you collect.  I'm going back to my room to jerk off with the covers up to my neck.  Too much romance.  This is for us dad.  For you.  You'll see, we're gonna hug like men when this is over, without a word, two dumb animals with sad eyes, god damn it.  At last.  Cleaned out"...and then that spastic break when what was recorded over resumes... "Let's see you.  Start again.  Carefully.  In front of the mirror, begin there, see yourself."

     "O-o-oh. Oh.  I do that before I put on the dress. When I get out of the shower.  Before I put on my brassiere, black tonight."

     Her voice: From the start he had noticed a ventriloquistic quality in it.  She was away from the spot where the voice originated, in mood and vantage.  She had beautiful, full lips, and her mechanics of speaking were opulent.  Each syllable was molded through a kiss.  The result was a precision that was also lush, a topiary trimming.  Her voice was slightly mechanical, there even seemed to be rusty places on it, these were where anger abraded it into scratchy hoarseness, but for the most part it had the frictionless, flensed perfection of silver joints.  

   Her voice was hypnotic for him.  He was trained in hypnosis.  The voice is essential to the technique.  It should be seamless, without hesitations, preferably silky or felt-like, a little sing-song.  An incantation.  What the hypnotist creates is a voice without inflection or personality, without the ability to clash and arouse.  Freud said the dream functions to keep the sleeper asleep. That was the voice desired.  Only audible to an inner ear, the sable echo of one's own inner voice. 

     What would sex be like for her?  There would be passion, not emotion or feeling, these would seem mere fretwork compared to the rescue of a soul-a weight that severe and perilous. But, temperance. Not reserve, but an ordained futility.  At the very moment of recovery, of solid arrival: Futility.  An instant fading.  What would he feel through his arms?  A shocking lightness, her arrival when completed already including her withdrawal.  No sooner would she surely be in her lover's arms than he would feel the imported emptiness, the echoless stillness accompanying her return: The substance of her dreamless soul.   Without residue of gratitude or recognition for him.   And in most cases this was all that he would sense.  But for some, some few, given the endless time to see without being scrutinized by her pure blank stare-he might see the greater alienation from experience and affection and warmth and memory and terror, and even see as well her acclimation to those states of non-self from where she had just returned. 

     One lover in ten, perhaps, would know the chill, so immediate to him, was final and infinite.  He would know it for that brief time before he was captured again.  While beholding her in a catastrophe as great as birth or death, only the fatal proximity to such larger event pushing him outside of the act for brief moments to actually behold her apart before her instinctual sexual assaying noted his distance and took him in again, took him absolutely: The inclusion of the male to his very fiber, to his all, and in that all, the blank, frozen awe at futures begun and ended here and now and beyond.  Only briefly might he witness her aloft or buried.  How would this look to him, this fusion of opposites? A trembling quietude he could not interpret?  A humming in her he could feel, shivers and tremors, nearness to a density that might sink him like an anvil, but which embraced her?  No flailing, no writhing, no protest or pain or drama in her, no space left outside the grip on her for these things to occupy.  He could only guess at the distinction between burial and flight as she passed through the absolute deeps...seeing the angelic torpor and disinterest of the creature aloft over the fathomless: Her ecstasy without rapture, that erasure of emptiness inside itself that was her sought for release, this dissolution of soul into its origins and end in vacuum. 

     Before she required him again  ("Several ways to remind the man if his mind is wandering"), and Manny had her enumerate because he required from her grace and mastery, it was around these that his hope centered, in his transparent possession of her sexual genius, her instrumentality, out of which she had already been removed. 

     She deteriorated with the continued use of medications.    She said she was suicidal and the drugs were all that were keeping her alive.  He thought it likely that she threatened suicide to get the drugs.  She had the strategies of an addict.  She began speaking like a junkie, long pauses in which it seemed the machinery of the brain had simply stopped or as if she had forgotten what she was saying or could no longer make sense of language.  She blanked out.  Once, her silences had impressed him; they were evidence of this mastery of hers, her lack of excitement and her assurance, or the absolutism at her center.  Now, stupidities echoed from the dead space, as if he were overhearing the testimonials of ex-alcoholics and addicts from a twelve step program, as if one of those bare rooms with the circle of folding chairs had been implanted in her breast.  She repeated the cant she heard from her friends who by this time, it appeared, had streamlined the chore of talking to her into a corner man's spurring of will. 

     Her descent was a relief to him, at first.  He was sure he had fallen out of love with her.  Because of the drugs it was probably too late for him ever to actually be a good therapist for her, but at least he was no longer acting out of repressed desire. After all, she bored him.  She even disgusted him.  But then, the disgust became exciting.  It made him the slightest bit drunk, gave him a buzz.  Her abused body permitted him a sloppy exuberance.  He need not be so careful.  His feelings were not tangled any more.  Her beauty had made him delicate or deferential or petulant, at times.  Now, he was aroused and fascinated by the dandruff and psoriasis she developed, by the intimacy seeing them gave to him.  Dry white spittle lodged at the corners of her mouth.

     He sat beside her on the couch, she had begun surrendering to slovenly sobs, two ribbons of glistening mucous ran from her nose.  He put an arm around her and comforted her.  Her sobs were a chugging labor.  He stroked her hair.  It was coarser than he expected.  She seemed pregnant, as abducted by the mundane as a pregnant woman, and like a pregnant woman afflicted and somehow disposed of and despised, trapped in a form which seemed punished and benighted.  She was not pregnant, he did not feel towards her what he felt for a pregnant woman, but there were more than inklings of it.  He looked at her larded thighs, naked because her tights no longer fit.  They would slog and trudge.  He had the lover's feeling of being dragged along into earthy tasks, of getting hitched to the plow.  He reveled in this loss of aesthetics.  His ethical sense, even his moral sense, lapsed in this squalor.  He had never liked the denning part of marriage with Florence, the plowed earth musk of dirty diapers and the filling of the apartment with female flesh, its emissions and diurnal rhythms.  But, now he could enjoy a domestic seediness.  He patted her thigh, its nakedness was no longer luminous.  She was part of the soiled world.  He squeezed her flaccid arm, her head lolled onto his shoulder.

     "Take some simple steps.  It wouldn't hurt to spend a day cleaning your apartment.  And doing a wash.  Odors cling to clothes."

     "I can't wear any of my clothes anymore.  Just these."  

     She stuck out her tongue, a white film adhered to it. 

     "Hygiene is important.  There's no exemption.  It's unfortunate, being ill should be enough, but the clock is still ticking.  At middle age the body's chemistry begins to change.  It's noticeable.  For poets, artists, martyrs, unless they're saints."

     Her eyes sometimes rolled back in her head like a doll's.  Their heaviness had seemed part of the erotic anomie he imagined for her, weighted by witness and verdict.  By the end, they seemed dumb as oxen's.  He sat next to her on the couch at the end of the session, not every session, just a few, enough to make it seem normal to him, until it did, and he could do it without stage fright, plop down next to her like she was a passenger on a bus, with as little regard, holding her prescription in one hand.  Times for refills were the opportunities he picked to sit beside her, holding the paper out of her reach, not deliberately, but as if it was demeaning for him to deal with, until she had to ask for it, which she could not do right away, not until he had perhaps stroked her hair, lifting it at last off the nape and brushing the chaste saddle of skin that stretched across the string of vertebrae, and then she would remind him, and he would look startled, as if she had said something impolite, as if the whole topic was, or she had not been listening, as if the paper in his hand was un-pocketed change she was asking for. 

     Later, over the years since her suicide, he realizes something else had evolved in him during her rapid decline.  Rather than falling out of love with her a physical commiseration had grown in him.  He did not recognize it at the time, it seemed to him that all he did was abuse her abandoned body, but later, listening to the tapes, he found that the opportunities he had taken to touch her, to sit close enough to her to insure that her opiated body would lean heavily against him, now made him physically miss her, to miss that real weight, even the remembered stale and chemical odors that hung about her.  Her drugged state had allowed him to gain an intimacy with her, and losing that intimacy turned out to be the greatest part of his grief, while the loss of her beauty and with it his cursed intoxication with her has faded in importance.  At the time her beauty had seemed an emblem of a governing order to the world based on cruelty and power, and when it paled it seemed a vindication of this principal's ruthless precedence over life, and now he cannot make that seem significant compared to her single death. 

     She had reported an early attempt at suicide.  It was too stylized to have been sincere; she had been at an age of artistic excess, twenty years ago, her expectations were lyrical, a state of temper he did not see her as capable of anymore.  Besides, she had only gone through the preparations: Ran the bath water, laid the safety razor on the edge, climbed into the tub, and toyed with the hallucinogenic changes her resolution had brought to everything she saw or thought.  Finally, her boyfriend at the time barged in to use the toilet and broke the spell.  She had to tell him what had been going on or he would never have noticed, and it was immediately impossible for her to recapture the insouciant nostalgia she had been feeling toward life, which could have been proof of her actual nearness to the act.  All she had left was a simple arithmetic to measure her proximity, the half hour or so the clock had parsed off before her boyfriend's entrance.  Had her will already been weakening, was that already too long a hesitation?  Or too short a period to balance against other gaps of boredom and passive aggression that were part of a normal day?   

     She reported to Manny that during the week since her last appointment she had spent a night sharpening a knife.  Her somewhat boyfriend was visiting. Manny had heard of him before.  They had not been able to decide on a title for him.  They never had sex, the medicines had effectively spaded her, but he was available for moral support at any time.  He was relieved, Manny thought by the lessor culpability which came with no longer being her lover.  It seemed to Manny that his main goal at this time was to slip away on tip-toe with her still balanced upright, at least until he left the room.  He thought, too, that she used him for a straw dog for Manny and their therapeutic relationship.     

     "He doesn't want sex either.  He is much happier now that I'm a fat girl so he has a reason.  He's feeling much better.  He was a problematic performer, but so elegant and attentive when apologizing that I can't lose him.  He does errands.  He wants to act like we're married and don't have to fuck anymore, thank god.  He likes me better fat and ugly because he is so loyal now.  We're so boring.  We don't say anything anymore.  Since we don't sleep together he can be smug.  I don't dress for him.  I'm so fat now, and I see it excites him.  It was too competitive for him before, now he is doing me a big favor.  He wants to do favors and be superior.  He wants to please, maybe he needs a mommy.  We're married all right.  We're so boring together.  He's so pontifical.  He talks on and on.  What is he saying?  He wants to touch me now.  He's always patting me like a buddy, every chance he gets.  Yack.  Yack.  Yack.  I'll be all right, he's saying.  I've got to be strong.  Don't give up.  What did he tell me once?  I have too many secrets because my parents were in an internment camp.  I'm trying too hard to not be Japanese.  I'm ashamed. Like all survivors.  I should be Japanese.  What's he mean?  He wants to touch me now that it would be such a favor and he would be my savior.  He's getting horny.  In our trashy life he can be horny.  He feels like a prince down there.  Japanese.  I've had Jewish boy friends.  They all want me to be the first Jew.  They always think everybody else is in the Golden Age while they're too smart to get in.  He thinks he looks Eurasian.  From the Middle East, but the Japanese are more perfect.  I showed him Japanese, all night I sharpened the knife and he comes in and out of the kitchen sputtering and can't leave because he doesn't know who the knife is for.  He should see himself then.  He's got no place with his Japanese Medea, ah, ah, ah, ah, flapping his arms, caw, caw, caw."

     Listening to this uncommon harangue by her, usually she sat stonily or sniveled, Manny thought the contemplation of suicide had had its usual tonic effect, clearing the mind and restoring pride of purpose, and thought it had already served and was not really a threat anymore, and that furthermore it had allowed her to take a shot at him; since he had not prevented her from swerving so close to the edge she had in effect out-argued or out-smarted and eluded him.   

     And then, on his watch, she tried again, and it was only the intervention of her friends that saved her.  They grew uneasy whenever she lingered in a bathroom in a restaurant.  She was so fixated on suicide, talking of nothing else, that she had lost a woman's privilege to dawdle over her toilette while the rest of the table hangs fire, and when she failed to answer her telephone on a morning when she should have been awake for work-she was maniacal about schedules, she seemed to have lost any memory of their context or reason, but depended on rolling along in their ruts-they roused the super to open her door with a key.      

     She was laying on the bed, dressed for a chilly evening's stroll in pants and cashmere sweater, whether out of modesty or a consideration for death's chill approach they wondered, and felt guilty for wondering since it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking standing over her body.  And more bitchily still, noticing that she had on her black boots, which tipped the balance to image and vanity.

     Her friends on guard that day were a couple.  The vigil rotated, friends spelling friends.  Manny got the report from the husband who had met Matsui through his wife.  He was handling her temporal affairs one of which was informing the shrink, while his wife visited Matsui at the clinic where a man would be a sullen encumbrance.  The consensus was that Manny was to blame and this fellow plowed into Manny over the phone with the gusto which comes with relief.  He had been chaffing under the rule of righteously sad women finally completely in their element. 

     Manny waited out his initial exuberance, and bogged him down in documenting what might be called medical details or psychological clues, all of them useless and tedious, but not incidentally forcing the guy to confess his morbid curiosity and a spiking of arousal the body in its state of sedated debauchery had caused him.  And confess, too, the frenzied gossip they were all enjoying in the aftermath of the attempt. Its religious timbre and invigorated purpose.  And a sense all of them had gained of being rare and imperiled and wiser.         

     She had left neat and resolved, with her house dusted and polished, dishes washed and stacked in their cabinets, clothes folded in their drawers, in that state of mature detachment a suicide often gains at the end, and she was dragged back as a frazzled ruin and thrown in with other wrecks to endure a two week remedial course in how to live normally. 

     Manny did not visit her at the clinic.  She was under the care of the house rehabilitation experts.  The details of the perverse turn his therapy had taken would not be revealed or believed.  The testimony of suicides is disregarded: Their interpretations have failed the most basic test of keeping them alive.  A tacit superiority is felt towards them.  Insincerity and manipulation is assumed.  The treatments pointedly ignore or drown out in tuneless rhetoric any suggestion that the suicide may have opposed the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, that he might have shown gallantry and sober courage or conclusive judgement or had turned a cold eye on life and death.  They were treated as victims of their emotions with crippled intelligence.  In this institution of sandbox group therapy, her lost sessions with Manny had the aspect of romance, and she phoned out to him when she could and attacked and plead like an ex-lover. 

     Wasn't he going to call her?  He wasn't going to just abandon her, was he?  How could he?  He couldn't just run away.  Look what he had done.  He couldn't just pretend he didn't know.  Why didn't he call?  Didn't he have a medical responsibility?  Did she embarrass him now?  And then: She was losing weight. 

     He could hear the television in the background.  The telephone was in the common room.  She had a sneering mockery in her voice then, she asked him what color nightgowns he preferred.  Someone else was waiting to use the phone, perhaps to call their own shrink, he could sense she was talking for the other person to hear as well.  She had brought her black one.  Was that OK? 

     He shouldn't blame himself.  Is that what kept him from calling?  And if he was blaming himself, was this handling it?  This was hardly the time.  She was the issue.  She was in no shape to take care of him.  Did he have to hear he was not to blame?  Would that make a difference?  Well then, he was not to blame.  Did he feel better, could she talk now?  Would he listen?  Or would he now stop even taking her calls?   Now that he was off the hook?  He could go back to his world.  A thousand pardons.  Forgive the intrusion.  Psychiatrists do quite well.  Their patients are a necessary inconvenience, otherwise what a wonderful world they live in.  Did he own any impressionists?  She preferred Cezanne.  The others were frivolous compared.  Did he have a summer place, in Buck's county maybe?  She bet he was a good driver.  She concurred with his selection of a BMW, no, she really wouldn't hear an alternative.  She simply wouldn't, she would put her hands over her ears before she would listen to such talk.  Did he think they should re-institute the scarlet letter?  These incarcerations flew by so fast, and then none the wiser.  All that wasted effort.  She would not be watching soap operas upon her dismissal and she doubted very much that her new friends would last.  The food was awful, the decor non-existent.  She might escape improvement altogether, unless she were reminded by a branding of some sort.  Otherwise she might be quite inconspicuous.  But, really, they were taught to be, but it was such a dilemma, suppressing pride but not leaving one so anonymous that one forgot one's responsibility and the privilege of being alive, about which one was already so nonchalant.

     She called him out of the habit of life. She just wanted to make it through these two weeks and be released, but she could not remain aloof.  She fell victim to the habits and reflexes of this redundant life.

     She knew what she was considered by looking at those stored in this place with her.  She did not have enough endurance to do anything but resist the immediate implications.  She was not planning on a future, she did not believe in a substance inside of this farce, a reason to endure the sham because of a promise of joy or love or cure.  The dimensions were fixed.  Her voice was cold with rage.  She was locked in with boring and ugly company as a punishment for failure.  He thought she was angry too because she had not been angry when she ended her life before, and she thought she was succumbing to debasement and her present anger, a low level of consciousness, was the proof.  She would be stuck in the coils of insult and retribution, constantly balancing the books, never clear of debt and finished with it as she had been before. 

     He did not know she was going to kill herself within three weeks.  She may have thought from the beginning that she had simply been interrupted and must wait this out, or she may have conceived it again as the only escape, the only privacy she had left, the only secret that held interest for her.  Maybe.  He believed, though, that it was not on her mind then, that the situation was too endlessly petty to earn escape, and suicide as it had been transcribed into pidgin in the group sessions was too enfeebled to survive outside the walls of this institution.   Suicide was able to be measured here, and it was smaller than the tedium and vandalizing boredom.  Suicide would not exceed the reach of deadened lives; it could not reach death, not anymore, and what death it might succeed in, had been polluted unto dismal. 

     She was on the public phone.  She did not whisper, everything she said was part of the continuum of the place.  The clinic had no limits; she expected him to already be privy to the narrative, plunged in it as they all were.  As soon as he picked up the phone he heard, "She's coming back right now.  She'll come right over here.  She's going to want to know your name.  I'm not going to tell her.  SSh.  Don't say anything.  She never combs her hair.  Deliberately, she doesn't want to get thrown out of here.  Here she is."   A commotion on the other side.  "None of your beeswax.  She's going to take the phone.  Don't breathe a word."

     A woman's beefy, threatening voice, full of phlegm but still brittle:  "You're not doing her any good.  You didn't, you know.  And now you're not giving her a chance to get better.  Maybe, you're afraid she will, then where would you be?  You should have some conscience, give her a chance.  She's supposed to concentrate on her work here and all you're doing is letting her continue with her lies.  It didn't work.  Won't you be satisfied till she's dead?  This is serious you know.  She tried to kill herself, she'd be dead if it was just for you.  Who do you think you are, risking her like this?  You just really don't give a shit, do you?  Me. Me. Me.  She's in trouble.  She looks like shit.  You wrung your little sweetheart almost clean out.  She's a fat faced mama san, don't you think maybe you've done enough already?  I'm sure she was just a pretty little wisp of a girl once upon a time, but she's a washed out dishrag now, and she better start facing it or she's never going to be anybody's heart throb again, least of all you, you self-righteous jerk.  Go ahead, it's your funeral."  

     Then Matsui's voice again:  "She's going over to sit on the chair and stare at me until I hang up the phone.  Then she'll follow me around.  She's in my group.  She's decided she can save my life.  She says I'm not facing who I am and if I don't I'll just kill myself again.  She's in and out of here all the time.  She's a funny color from the meds.  I can't get away, she thinks we're sisters. There's no privacy here.  I've got the wrong nightgown, too revealing.  If I called my super, do you think he could bring me my old Mother Hubbard flannel one.  He'd have no trouble finding it in my drawer, everything else is satin and silk".

     And then again,

     "It's TV time now.  Everybody is sitting around watching TV.  I never realized what shows they have on in the day.  There's one where people talk truth to the people who have hurt them in life, and then they hit them.  That's very popular here.  We're not well, so we're not allowed to hit one another, but we're anxious to get out where we can participate.  Day time TV is very generous to the ugly, I don't remember seeing them at night, anyway, not in serious roles.  We're all very grateful.  Someone said he thinks the worm is turning and the dogs will soon have their day.  Another thing to look forward to.  Uh-oh, she was not so absorbed as I thought.  I know she'll want to say a few words to you, just look at it as local color.  A weird yellowish-grey, puce I think.  Oh, everybody's wearing it."

     Again, the morning voice of the woman in her group, this time sinisterly sweet.

     "Is it you again, you patient ear.  She has a special place in her heart for you and we've all got to treat you better because she's so dear to us.  She keeps trying to withdraw from us, that's really the problem, and we love her so much.  The right word from you might help.  I've told her we're her family now, but she rejects us.  She thinks you're going to take her back.  She does.  I don't even think she remembers what that was.  But, a word from you now could save her so much pain later on.  Just tell her that suicidal Orientals are not your cup of tea.  Tell her how you always wanted a silky little lotus blossom sitting on your lap, and it just won't work with a bone crushing fat ass.  That would be so kind of you.  You know how you are, boychick, when you've run out of patience.  Remind her what it'll be when you're tired of being good."                                    She had called him at his office and at home.  Patients had this number for emergencies.  He had an answering machine.  When he heard her voice he would pick up the receiver.  He had recorded some of these calls.  She had killed herself a week after the last one.  He had called her when she was released from the clinic.  She had been home for a day. 

     "It's Doctor Mahler.  How are you?"

     "What?  I don't feel like talking.  I have to clean up.  I'm still cleaning up.  I don't feel like talking.  I have to do a lot of cleaning.  I don't want to talk here.  I don't want to talk to you here.  I have to clean this place up."

     "Of course.  We can talk later.  If you should feel like it.  I hope you're feeling better."

     "We can talk later.  Better later."

     They never spoke again. 

     She was more efficient this time.  She probably did not have enough pills remaining to do the job on their own, and she had learned that she had only so much time alone before an unanswered telephone would arouse suspicion.  This time she took enough pills to put her to sleep and tied a plastic bag over her head so she would suffocate in her sleep. 

     She did not leave a note, she hadn’t the first time either,but this time she had laid several books on Zen Buddhism on the bed near her, with a few paper markers between the pages.  To justify herself?  To relieve her friends of guilt over her aloneness by implying she had belief of something at the end or that, at least, she was too deluded to have really suffered?  Or, were the passages marked simply better written than she thought herself able to do at the time?  Manny thought a note must be difficult to reconcile with the act. While writing it the usual aggravating voices of vanity and hypocrisy would resume their twaddle, insulting resolve.  Few were left in this culture who might ever be certain of the unanimity of their decisions. 

     These tapes were as close to a voice from the grave as she was going to leave.  He could not follow her last steps, she might have reported them to him after the first time, but typically, those rescued after proving their last full measure of devotion had nothing revelatory to say; perhaps, like those spit back by the sea, their devotion had had the wrong flavor and they were not permitted entrance into the green gardens where mermaids sing.  

     But her physical presence which has materialized on listening to these tapes presses too closely into him to be ceded without a word to the blankness following her last words to him, and he cannot release this presence into vanishing dream stuff without putting some message on the long hour of tape that was never used. "We can talk later.  Better later", and he presses the record button to cover over that chasm:

     "A woman told me this story.  She was woken up by the telephone.  Very late.  After two in the morning.  `Elaine?  It's Terrance.'  Terance had died twenty years ago.  On stage.  He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert.  He had made love with every French professor he had had.  She was one of them.  `Terrance.  It's nice to hear from you.  How are things over there?' she asked.  He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out.  It had snuck up on him.  He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall.  All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes.  He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines.  A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away.  `I'm so happy for you, Terrance.  It sounds beautiful.  Blue skies.  I'm so relieved, I've stopped believing that was possible.  I hardly seem to care much about them here.  I didn't think I'd get that back.  Oh, I hope so, I hope I didn't put if off too long.'  He answered, `You didn't.  We didn't.  The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.'  `What a surprise.  I've grown resigned.  I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway.  So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest.  Grey clouds sounded much more like it.  Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky.  We all miss you.'  `But, that's why I called.  I miss you.  I think it was the sun coming back.  I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were.  For me.  You could be.  You're so generous.  You can't help it.  I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing.  A light on everything, I was thinking, and you came to mind.  You know, the sun was warming my pants, I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up.  What are you wearing?'  `Terrance.  You mustn't think that way.  Not there.  It's too sad.  It's awful.  To still think that way.  They should never have stopped the rain.  I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame.  It must be a dream.  We must be allowed to forget.  I'll pray for you.  I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back.  And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me.  It's so unseemly of me.  You're just a boy.  And I miss you.  So, unfair.  I've got to let you go.  But, it's harder now than it was before.  It's all I have left.  It's got to be a sin to summon the dead.  But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you.  Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now.  You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone.  Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.'

     Well, it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but Terrance on sabbatical in Florence, separated by seven hours and a few months of blessed silence after a year of venomous spiffs.  Terrance with the skinny legs and bad breath.  That Terrance, the one whose co-habitation inside the name of the musician had struck her as grotesque, and who then served as one of those messengers in dreams who always seem to be wearing disguises.  I've told you the story.It did happen, I've added to it, it scared her.  She was brave conversing with the dead when she was still groggy, she just continued the conversation in the spell of dreaming when such things can seem normal.  But she became superstitious when repeating it to me and stopped abruptly, afraid we were being overheard.  I told it to you to remind you how the living always have an ear cocked to the dead.  We shouldn't think it is illicit, or ominous.  Please, it's a thing of sunny days.  You've probably forgotten, but we have always heard your dead voices whispering through the leaves, even in sunlight. 

     Do you have a spare moment?  You know, it is not that far from my office to the East River.  When I get the chance, I walk there.  There's a park around Gracie Mansion.  I walk through it.  I'd like you to come along.  Do you like pigeons?  Everybody is obligated not to.  I've always liked them.  Maybe, you would understand that more.  They live here as if we don't, that might seem prescient to you.  Maybe, you see them more clearly than you see us.  Especially when they fly.  Maybe, you're fooled into thinking they belong with you.  When I was a kid I spent too much time alone.  You are familiar to me.  I think we should be on these terms, I imagine you along with me.  It's quite natural to us.  Your absence, it's familiar to me, from empty mirrors.  I could enter the space where my shadow lived.  And look out.   Did you know, Matsui, that beauty carries that space inside it?  Doesn't that change everything between us?  Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them?  Did you hear them more personally?  Did you?  If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you?  I don't believe you can hear any of this, by now you're dust.  Am I here to say good-bye at last?  But, it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with, that the rest of us learn  we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled  will be eternal.  There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."

     He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.  

     He nodded off.  A minute later he wakes, saying what?  What?  into the dark room.  He cannot remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhowette with outflung arms cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him, and he does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.                  

                    

 

       

                                         

 

     

  

 

                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two Japanese-Americans.  Did they have to have known you at all?  Did they?  As it turned out, two weeks.  Did they know you?  Your friends.  Or not? "

     "They were trying to be helpful."

     "Not glib?"

     "They were trying to be helpful.  He is a lawyer.  Highly successful.  They like him.  It was for him, too.  He was looking for someone too.  Most are already married.  It seemed like good fortune."

     "Little Benny."     

     He can hear her gasp on the tape, he knows she has covered her mouth with her hand, he remembers that, her eyes wide, an actor's gesture of shock, and now comes her laughter, like water falling from pool to pool, or like glass breaking, a quality to it, not the sound, but the purity, the icy reserve, breaking apart, falling to pieces shard by tinkling shard.  The laugh encouraged bravery, it relished mischief.  It was ready to be shocked and delighted in it.  It invited one to take a chance.  It would be rewarded.  He had made her recite the beginnings of her affairs.  They had all begun precipitously.  She was always finally grabbed. 

     He is making her repeat a story in this tape.  He already knows it.  He is leading her towards one part of it.  He anticipates it now.  He did then.

     "You should have known, introducing himself that way.  Bernard might have been different.  Just what you might have needed for rescue.  So, not such good fortune.  Because..."

     "It was unsatisfactory."

     "Yes?"

     "It was not satisfactory."

     "Couldn't you say you were not satisfied?  Yes?  You were not satisfied."

     "I was not satisfied."

     "And why not?"

     "We have discussed this."

     "And you are still saying `it' was unsatisfactory, so I feel as if we haven't talked about it at all.  You knew from the beginning.  It was not a general malaise, didn't you?  Because you went to your apartment.  At that point you were still ready to give it a go, or maybe it was just easier or maybe you might show him a thing or two and your friends, and just maybe, who knows, maybe you'll get a surprise.  So, be complete, let's see what we turn up.  He is in your apartment."

     "He is in my apartment."

     "And?  Are the lights off?  Did you have drinks?  Tell me what you were wearing.  You have to make an effort.  The medications come in conjunction with an effort."

     "I wore a black dress.  We kissed right away.  Why else would I invite him in?  But he goes looking for a closet to hang his coat.  When his arms are caught in the sleeves-he tried shrugging it off both shoulders at once and I know he is too nervous if he is doing that. He is a highly successful lawyer, and the back of the coat is flopped over the two sleeves and he is pinned, he'll have to gyrate, and I kissed him then because I think I lost patience."

     "You were not touched, perhaps, by his nervousness?"

     "He looks stupid.  It's exasperating.  I don't want to see it anymore.  He's a monkey in that coat.  Ben-ny.   Ben-ny.   Why doesn't he know how to take off a coat?   He can't even put his arms around me.  He turned away.  He is embarrassed.  He is always going to be ashamed."

     "And you?"

     "I am not ashamed.  He is silly."

     "And that's when you touched him, wasn't it?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "What's he there for, anyway?"

     "Because nothing else is left.  No other reason by now for him to be there, so let's get it over with, or what?"

     "He's just silly.  Glum as a plum.  All night already I have listened to his serious talk.  Too boring.  I am tired of being humble daughter.  I don't want to hear one more word."

     "This will shut him up."

     "Oh, yes.  He still can't get his arms out of the coat.  I drop his pants down, too.  He has on boxer shorts.  Then I go to the bedroom."

     "You left him there with his pants around his ankles."

     "Let him show courage."

     "Did you think he would follow?"

     "Eventually."

     "You didn't care, already?"

     "I went to the bathroom to prepare."

     "But, you knew there was no point to it already.  You had..."

     "I had courage for us both.  Kicking him out would be rude.  I am a civilized woman.  He should learn to take off his coat and to not talk like a student.  He is a highly successful lawyer."

     "But, when you had him in your hand, you already knew this would not go on long."

     The gasp and laugh again. 

     "You would not have continued, even if you found other reasons.  No other reasons would have been sufficient to overcome that, (he hears himself cough, again, his throat had obviously become dry) aberration."

     "I treated him with courtesy."

     "He never knew.  But, you were firm.  You broke it off."

     Her laugh again. 

     "You had him in your hand.  Why didn't you?  Why did you drag things out?"

     "That would have been bad manners."

     "What did he do when you touched him?"

     "The man always becomes serious then.  He was concentrated."

     "You don't remember anything else, about him?"

     She laughed.

     "He moaned.  Men are very Gothic then."

     "He didn't say anything?  That you remember."

     "For once he did not say anything."

     "They do sometimes, don't they?"

     "Sometimes."

     "The first time?"

     "Sometimes."

     "You can't remember?"

     "I love you.  Gibberish."

     "Never anything you believe."

     "It is not the time to extract promises."

     "You've never known at that moment, this is different?  This one is special?"

     She laughed again.   

     His voice again, taut.  Reacting to her laugh.  She has swung away from what he wanted.  He is leading her back.

     "Maybe, you laugh when you become uncomfortable.  When you begin to see yourself in what you are doing.  That might be the place for our most valuable work.  Let's concentrate at that point.  We should try bringing to consciousness what you bury there.  We left him with his pants tangled around his ankles, a belittling situation for him to find himself in, but he doesn't just find himself there, you've put him there and yet all that has been skipped.  What is your part in this?  You undid his pants, you remember very well the result of what you did, enjoy it, I think, but don't take responsibility for it.  So, try again. "    

     "Try again?'

     "Exactly."

     "Again. Grr.  Too boring."

     "Avoidance.  From when you kissed him."

     "I did not kiss him."

     "He is taking off his coat."

     "I didn't kiss him for that.  He looks too stupid.  He has no manners.  He is unsophisticated."

     He remembers how she would stretch before she was forced into digging into these memories, or before she made them up for him.  She would sit up.  And she would do small calisthenics with her neck and shoulders to loosen them up.  It was a strange body language, ritualistic and probably adopted from her father, who walked about with rocks on his back to strengthen his heart.  She would roll her shoulders, and lean her head back and turn it side to side.  Then she would begin, looking at him at the head of the couch, testing the story, perhaps, before laying back down.  When he remembers the calisthenics, he remembers how incongruously mechanical they were in her body which was so completely female, not zaftig, but a body where the femaleness was spread evenly, where joints were rounded together and her skin, for all its want of bosom and haunch, was suffused with luxuriousness and seamless smoothness.  The arm rowing, the head swaying, she might have been a child imitating a man.  Maybe, a child called on to join an adult activity and following the whole ritual without knowing which parts were critical.

     "You didn't kiss him.  You grabbed him."

     "Ah.  Yes?  I did not grab him.  His stomach is sticking out.  Like a little boy.  I patted his stomach, he's got a little pot belly, I stuck a finger through his shirt, but he has his pants too high, covering his belly button.  He's going to put his coat back on?  Or what is he going to do?  So, I undid his belt.  He's in boxer underwear.  Hopeless."

     "The pants just drop off when you unfasten the belt?  You're running through this again.  Take more time."

     "Uh-huh.  Of course.  Of course, I had to unzip him.  Right?  Uh-huh.  Carefully, I don't want him to get caught.  I hold him inside so he will not get caught.  Push him down.  He is wearing tailored pants, if he goes to the courtroom he must wear these pants.  They have a button inside so the fly goes right down because the pants do not spread.  I have to unbutton that button, also.  Right?  Right.  He's peeking through the fly.  Sure.  I give it a pinch.  In fun.  It's not such a tragedy.  Let's go.  OK?"

     "You've skipped over your disappointment.  We know there was that.  But, then his feelings.  What did you notice?  He didn't say anything?"

     "Too fast.  I have to hold him down so the zipper will not bite him.  He does not want to go down.  I am firm about this for his own good.  I am responsible for his well-being.  I have him completely in my hand, too bad, but he must be nervous, so I squeeze him, maybe that's not just right, I just squeeze the end with two fingers, is that better?, or I can put my thumb below the glans, it's like a little hat, and I can press there, a...a, below the glans, and hold it around, or? Or, just squeeze it a little, just with my fingertips. Until he makes some noises, grumph, grumph, Mr. Attorney, maybe.  Maybe not.  I can hear him breathing.  Like he has been running and wants to keep quiet?"

     "No protest?  Maybe, you didn't notice.  One might expect, his pants at his ankles, some protest.  A word perhaps.  His hands are tied.  And then he's hobbled by the pants, and there is your competency, this is all happening without a hitch, so to speak.  Practiced routine, he's the unrehearsed element, as far as he can see.  He might protest that, being a push over so to speak.  A word.  One would expect it.  If you are truly engaged, you would likely remember him uttering the word.  Maybe, quite personal, or feeling that way, even if the word were not personnel at all. Just a word, but that instant, a plea. For the very reason nothing personnel can work, could possibly be understood, whether it was in his own language or in no language at all, not really able to be put into words, this plea to be taken personnel. And so he only has the one word which has to say all this and can't and really isn't a word at all when he says it, because he doesn't want you to hear it as you always have before, but only as it's coming from him, new, or very old, but out of him only and not some common currency.  If you were to carefully remember that time, if you had been more careful, I think you would remember that word."

     "If I was more careful. He said nothing."

     "Nothing?  Did he?  I don't think so.  It's hard for me to imagine him then believing in that nihilism.  I doubt he could have believed, just then, on his quick demise in your life.  He would be misinterpreting, thinking either he is irresistible, or at least touching in his awkwardness.  Not receiving the implied insult in your shop-lifting of this misplaced article.  I think instead, some totally inappropriate gravity.  Try to remember.  The tone should help you, it would have been as clangorous as the screams of someone deaf.  Think."

     "He didn't say anything."

    "I see, your construction before was artificial.  I missed that.  Theatrical even.  He said nothing.  Well, one of us certainly has been deaf this hour."

     "No. No. No. I have been listening."

     "Yes. Yes you have.  Just then you had it, didn't you?  I heard it.  You heard it at last.  You made it your own.  It was there but you didn't know it until it broke open in you, and then there it is, loud and clear, as if you had your ear to his heart.  "No, no, no".  His protest at being robbed of the chance of bringing to you a unique generosity, maybe we can name it charity, because at this moment of misinterpretation, he feels full enough that what he wishes to give has the size of unity sublime, soul mate, nothing less, and that is charity.  If one wished to carry this on, hearing that "no, no, no" as if he were still speaking it, entering into that suspended minute with him, I think we would see slipping away from him a chance to forgive himself forever the loathing which has kept him separate from his own heart.  Right then, I suspect, your being Japanese was like the closed door of a mirror suddenly opening and falling through into every answer ever asked."

     Silence during which the granulations in the air are recorded along with some relaying through the wooden desk of the sounds that strum through the ground.  Then,

     "I don't let him go.  No, I won't do this.  I hold him, oh, and he says, "no, no, no" but I am holding him, my hand is not so strong but for this I know it will be strong enough to be kind.  Very gentle, I remember, very sweet, it's good, very careful.  No need to worry, it's all right, OK, OK.  Oh. Oh. Oh."        

     Manny cringes when he listens to the tape of this session, shaking his head.  He has always been more interactive with his patients than is traditional in orthodox psychoanalysis, often interspersing sessions of free association on the couch with interpretive dialogues where he and the patient sit facing each other and evaluate the course of the treatment and reach agreements on progress and strategy.  But this herding of Matsui cannot be veiled as collaboration in treatment.  He can only spare himself by believing he had no choice himself, that he was more driven than driving and that the explanations he was brow-beating her with to force her compliance and which are so transparently rationalizations for an obsessive motive at the time were not understood by him.  But then...Certainly she knew.  He hears her designing her monologues to satisfy him, sometimes testing them word by word to see if they fit his obsession, tacking in mid-course to follow his lead.  And then this...tape after tape labeled Matsui which put on the machine turn out to have been erased or recorded over, the unbearable record of erotic pandering expunged.  Sometimes a fragment is left.  He must have erased them in wildly swinging moods, sometimes cold with icy resolve and other times in fits of agony, destroying the voice he regretted losing.  And Matsui, knowing the contract, familiar with it from her experiences with men and her ready objectification in their eyes, her ability to become an ideal form for them, dressing with ever increasing consistency for his pleasure, measuring his response until she knew without his ever having to say it that childish exhibitions of sexuality aroused him, innocently exposed chaste cotton underwear, coltish gestures and huge sighs of theatrical  exasperation, knowing the conditions under which she would continue getting her drugs.  

     Under cover of one tape labeled Matsui, a telephone conversation with Daniel, his son, when he left his wife some years back to become a jazz pianist.  Why recorded on the tape?  To make a record over this unbearable evidence that he had been a responsible father?  Aware of the text it was covering with every word spoken, he hears himself deliberate and concerned, altruistic, offering to pick his son up from the transient hotel he is staying at in Hartford and drive him home to his wife, offering as well to speak to her, smooth the waters, and accepting without protest Daniel's sarcastic provocations and accusations, accepting them with therapeutic or patriarchal patience.  "I thought it was cement glue.  OK, so that's the route-sniff that crap and drop the vocabulary.  I'd learn the blues. But that's semen stuck on the door.  These guys sit on the toilet and jerk off.  That's the blues and I can't do it. I'm calling you collect.  I'm going back to my room to jerk off with the covers up to my neck.  Too much romance.  This is for us dad.  For you.  You'll see, we're gonna hug like men when this is over, without a word, two dumb animals with sad eyes, god damn it.  At last.  Cleaned out"...and then that spastic break when what was recorded over resumes... "Let's see you.  Start again.  Carefully.  In front of the mirror, begin there, see yourself."

     "O-o-oh. Oh.  I do that before I put on the dress. When I get out of the shower.  Before I put on my brassiere, black tonight."

     Her voice: From the start he had noticed a ventriloquistic quality in it.  She was away from the spot where the voice originated, in mood and vantage.  She had beautiful, full lips, and her mechanics of speaking were opulent.  Each syllable was molded through a kiss.  The result was a precision that was also lush, a topiary trimming.  Her voice was slightly mechanical, there even seemed to be rusty places on it, these were where anger abraded it into scratchy hoarseness, but for the most part it had the frictionless, flensed perfection of silver joints.  

   Her voice was hypnotic for him.  He was trained in hypnosis.  The voice is essential to the technique.  It should be seamless, without hesitations, preferably silky or felt-like, a little sing-song.  An incantation.  What the hypnotist creates is a voice without inflection or personality, without the ability to clash and arouse.  Freud said the dream functions to keep the sleeper asleep. That was the voice desired.  Only audible to an inner ear, the sable echo of one's own inner voice. 

     What would sex be like for her?  There would be passion, not emotion or feeling, these would seem mere fretwork compared to the rescue of a soul-a weight that severe and perilous. But, temperance. Not reserve, but an ordained futility.  At the very moment of recovery, of solid arrival: Futility.  An instant fading.  What would he feel through his arms?  A shocking lightness, her arrival when completed already including her withdrawal.  No sooner would she surely be in her lover's arms than he would feel the imported emptiness, the echoless stillness accompanying her return: The substance of her dreamless soul.   Without residue of gratitude or recognition for him.   And in most cases this was all that he would sense.  But for some, some few, given the endless time to see without being scrutinized by her pure blank stare-he might see the greater alienation from experience and affection and warmth and memory and terror, and even see as well her acclimation to those states of non-self from where she had just returned. 

     One lover in ten, perhaps, would know the chill, so immediate to him, was final and infinite.  He would know it for that brief time before he was captured again.  While beholding her in a catastrophe as great as birth or death, only the fatal proximity to such larger event pushing him outside of the act for brief moments to actually behold her apart before her instinctual sexual assaying noted his distance and took him in again, took him absolutely: The inclusion of the male to his very fiber, to his all, and in that all, the blank, frozen awe at futures begun and ended here and now and beyond.  Only briefly might he witness her aloft or buried.  How would this look to him, this fusion of opposites? A trembling quietude he could not interpret?  A humming in her he could feel, shivers and tremors, nearness to a density that might sink him like an anvil, but which embraced her?  No flailing, no writhing, no protest or pain or drama in her, no space left outside the grip on her for these things to occupy.  He could only guess at the distinction between burial and flight as she passed through the absolute deeps...seeing the angelic torpor and disinterest of the creature aloft over the fathomless: Her ecstasy without rapture, that erasure of emptiness inside itself that was her sought for release, this dissolution of soul into its origins and end in vacuum. 

     Before she required him again  ("Several ways to remind the man if his mind is wandering"), and Manny had her enumerate because he required from her grace and mastery, it was around these that his hope centered, in his transparent possession of her sexual genius, her instrumentality, out of which she had already been removed. 

     She deteriorated with the continued use of medications.    She said she was suicidal and the drugs were all that were keeping her alive.  He thought it likely that she threatened suicide to get the drugs.  She had the strategies of an addict.  She began speaking like a junkie, long pauses in which it seemed the machinery of the brain had simply stopped or as if she had forgotten what she was saying or could no longer make sense of language.  She blanked out.  Once, her silences had impressed him; they were evidence of this mastery of hers, her lack of excitement and her assurance, or the absolutism at her center.  Now, stupidities echoed from the dead space, as if he were overhearing the testimonials of ex-alcoholics and addicts from a twelve step program, as if one of those bare rooms with the circle of folding chairs had been implanted in her breast.  She repeated the cant she heard from her friends who by this time, it appeared, had streamlined the chore of talking to her into a corner man's spurring of will. 

     Her descent was a relief to him, at first.  He was sure he had fallen out of love with her.  Because of the drugs it was probably too late for him ever to actually be a good therapist for her, but at least he was no longer acting out of repressed desire. After all, she bored him.  She even disgusted him.  But then, the disgust became exciting.  It made him the slightest bit drunk, gave him a buzz.  Her abused body permitted him a sloppy exuberance.  He need not be so careful.  His feelings were not tangled any more.  Her beauty had made him delicate or deferential or petulant, at times.  Now, he was aroused and fascinated by the dandruff and psoriasis she developed, by the intimacy seeing them gave to him.  Dry white spittle lodged at the corners of her mouth.

     He sat beside her on the couch, she had begun surrendering to slovenly sobs, two ribbons of glistening mucous ran from her nose.  He put an arm around her and comforted her.  Her sobs were a chugging labor.  He stroked her hair.  It was coarser than he expected.  She seemed pregnant, as abducted by the mundane as a pregnant woman, and like a pregnant woman afflicted and somehow disposed of and despised, trapped in a form which seemed punished and benighted.  She was not pregnant, he did not feel towards her what he felt for a pregnant woman, but there were more than inklings of it.  He looked at her larded thighs, naked because her tights no longer fit.  They would slog and trudge.  He had the lover's feeling of being dragged along into earthy tasks, of getting hitched to the plow.  He reveled in this loss of aesthetics.  His ethical sense, even his moral sense, lapsed in this squalor.  He had never liked the denning part of marriage with Florence, the plowed earth musk of dirty diapers and the filling of the apartment with female flesh, its emissions and diurnal rhythms.  But, now he could enjoy a domestic seediness.  He patted her thigh, its nakedness was no longer luminous.  She was part of the soiled world.  He squeezed her flaccid arm, her head lolled onto his shoulder.

     "Take some simple steps.  It wouldn't hurt to spend a day cleaning your apartment.  And doing a wash.  Odors cling to clothes."

     "I can't wear any of my clothes anymore.  Just these."  

     She stuck out her tongue, a white film adhered to it. 

     "Hygiene is important.  There's no exemption.  It's unfortunate, being ill should be enough, but the clock is still ticking.  At middle age the body's chemistry begins to change.  It's noticeable.  For poets, artists, martyrs, unless they're saints."

     Her eyes sometimes rolled back in her head like a doll's.  Their heaviness had seemed part of the erotic anomie he imagined for her, weighted by witness and verdict.  By the end, they seemed dumb as oxen's.  He sat next to her on the couch at the end of the session, not every session, just a few, enough to make it seem normal to him, until it did, and he could do it without stage fright, plop down next to her like she was a passenger on a bus, with as little regard, holding her prescription in one hand.  Times for refills were the opportunities he picked to sit beside her, holding the paper out of her reach, not deliberately, but as if it was demeaning for him to deal with, until she had to ask for it, which she could not do right away, not until he had perhaps stroked her hair, lifting it at last off the nape and brushing the chaste saddle of skin that stretched across the string of vertebrae, and then she would remind him, and he would look startled, as if she had said something impolite, as if the whole topic was, or she had not been listening, as if the paper in his hand was un-pocketed change she was asking for. 

     Later, over the years since her suicide, he realizes something else had evolved in him during her rapid decline.  Rather than falling out of love with her a physical commiseration had grown in him.  He did not recognize it at the time, it seemed to him that all he did was abuse her abandoned body, but later, listening to the tapes, he found that the opportunities he had taken to touch her, to sit close enough to her to insure that her opiated body would lean heavily against him, now made him physically miss her, to miss that real weight, even the remembered stale and chemical odors that hung about her.  Her drugged state had allowed him to gain an intimacy with her, and losing that intimacy turned out to be the greatest part of his grief, while the loss of her beauty and with it his cursed intoxication with her has faded in importance.  At the time her beauty had seemed an emblem of a governing order to the world based on cruelty and power, and when it paled it seemed a vindication of this principal's ruthless precedence over life, and now he cannot make that seem significant compared to her single death. 

     She had reported an early attempt at suicide.  It was too stylized to have been sincere; she had been at an age of artistic excess, twenty years ago, her expectations were lyrical, a state of temper he did not see her as capable of anymore.  Besides, she had only gone through the preparations: Ran the bath water, laid the safety razor on the edge, climbed into the tub, and toyed with the hallucinogenic changes her resolution had brought to everything she saw or thought.  Finally, her boyfriend at the time barged in to use the toilet and broke the spell.  She had to tell him what had been going on or he would never have noticed, and it was immediately impossible for her to recapture the insouciant nostalgia she had been feeling toward life, which could have been proof of her actual nearness to the act.  All she had left was a simple arithmetic to measure her proximity, the half hour or so the clock had parsed off before her boyfriend's entrance.  Had her will already been weakening, was that already too long a hesitation?  Or too short a period to balance against other gaps of boredom and passive aggression that were part of a normal day?   

     She reported to Manny that during the week since her last appointment she had spent a night sharpening a knife.  Her somewhat boyfriend was visiting. Manny had heard of him before.  They had not been able to decide on a title for him.  They never had sex, the medicines had effectively spaded her, but he was available for moral support at any time.  He was relieved, Manny thought by the lessor culpability which came with no longer being her lover.  It seemed to Manny that his main goal at this time was to slip away on tip-toe with her still balanced upright, at least until he left the room.  He thought, too, that she used him for a straw dog for Manny and their therapeutic relationship.     

     "He doesn't want sex either.  He is much happier now that I'm a fat girl so he has a reason.  He's feeling much better.  He was a problematic performer, but so elegant and attentive when apologizing that I can't lose him.  He does errands.  He wants to act like we're married and don't have to fuck anymore, thank god.  He likes me better fat and ugly because he is so loyal now.  We're so boring.  We don't say anything anymore.  Since we don't sleep together he can be smug.  I don't dress for him.  I'm so fat now, and I see it excites him.  It was too competitive for him before, now he is doing me a big favor.  He wants to do favors and be superior.  He wants to please, maybe he needs a mommy.  We're married all right.  We're so boring together.  He's so pontifical.  He talks on and on.  What is he saying?  He wants to touch me now.  He's always patting me like a buddy, every chance he gets.  Yack.  Yack.  Yack.  I'll be all right, he's saying.  I've got to be strong.  Don't give up.  What did he tell me once?  I have too many secrets because my parents were in an internment camp.  I'm trying too hard to not be Japanese.  I'm ashamed. Like all survivors.  I should be Japanese.  What's he mean?  He wants to touch me now that it would be such a favor and he would be my savior.  He's getting horny.  In our trashy life he can be horny.  He feels like a prince down there.  Japanese.  I've had Jewish boy friends.  They all want me to be the first Jew.  They always think everybody else is in the Golden Age while they're too smart to get in.  He thinks he looks Eurasian.  From the Middle East, but the Japanese are more perfect.  I showed him Japanese, all night I sharpened the knife and he comes in and out of the kitchen sputtering and can't leave because he doesn't know who the knife is for.  He should see himself then.  He's got no place with his Japanese Medea, ah, ah, ah, ah, flapping his arms, caw, caw, caw."

     Listening to this uncommon harangue by her, usually she sat stonily or sniveled, Manny thought the contemplation of suicide had had its usual tonic effect, clearing the mind and restoring pride of purpose, and thought it had already served and was not really a threat anymore, and that furthermore it had allowed her to take a shot at him; since he had not prevented her from swerving so close to the edge she had in effect out-argued or out-smarted and eluded him.   

     And then, on his watch, she tried again, and it was only the intervention of her friends that saved her.  They grew uneasy whenever she lingered in a bathroom in a restaurant.  She was so fixated on suicide, talking of nothing else, that she had lost a woman's privilege to dawdle over her toilette while the rest of the table hangs fire, and when she failed to answer her telephone on a morning when she should have been awake for work-she was maniacal about schedules, she seemed to have lost any memory of their context or reason, but depended on rolling along in their ruts-they roused the super to open her door with a key.      

     She was laying on the bed, dressed for a chilly evening's stroll in pants and cashmere sweater, whether out of modesty or a consideration for death's chill approach they wondered, and felt guilty for wondering since it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking standing over her body.  And more bitchily still, noticing that she had on her black boots, which tipped the balance to image and vanity.

     Her friends on guard that day were a couple.  The vigil rotated, friends spelling friends.  Manny got the report from the husband who had met Matsui through his wife.  He was handling her temporal affairs one of which was informing the shrink, while his wife visited Matsui at the clinic where a man would be a sullen encumbrance.  The consensus was that Manny was to blame and this fellow plowed into Manny over the phone with the gusto which comes with relief.  He had been chaffing under the rule of righteously sad women finally completely in their element. 

     Manny waited out his initial exuberance, and bogged him down in documenting what might be called medical details or psychological clues, all of them useless and tedious, but not incidentally forcing the guy to confess his morbid curiosity and a spiking of arousal the body in its state of sedated debauchery had caused him.  And confess, too, the frenzied gossip they were all enjoying in the aftermath of the attempt. Its religious timbre and invigorated purpose.  And a sense all of them had gained of being rare and imperiled and wiser.         

     She had left neat and resolved, with her house dusted and polished, dishes washed and stacked in their cabinets, clothes folded in their drawers, in that state of mature detachment a suicide often gains at the end, and she was dragged back as a frazzled ruin and thrown in with other wrecks to endure a two week remedial course in how to live normally. 

     Manny did not visit her at the clinic.  She was under the care of the house rehabilitation experts.  The details of the perverse turn his therapy had taken would not be revealed or believed.  The testimony of suicides is disregarded: Their interpretations have failed the most basic test of keeping them alive.  A tacit superiority is felt towards them.  Insincerity and manipulation is assumed.  The treatments pointedly ignore or drown out in tuneless rhetoric any suggestion that the suicide may have opposed the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, that he might have shown gallantry and sober courage or conclusive judgement or had turned a cold eye on life and death.  They were treated as victims of their emotions with crippled intelligence.  In this institution of sandbox group therapy, her lost sessions with Manny had the aspect of romance, and she phoned out to him when she could and attacked and plead like an ex-lover. 

     Wasn't he going to call her?  He wasn't going to just abandon her, was he?  How could he?  He couldn't just run away.  Look what he had done.  He couldn't just pretend he didn't know.  Why didn't he call?  Didn't he have a medical responsibility?  Did she embarrass him now?  And then: She was losing weight. 

     He could hear the television in the background.  The telephone was in the common room.  She had a sneering mockery in her voice then, she asked him what color nightgowns he preferred.  Someone else was waiting to use the phone, perhaps to call their own shrink, he could sense she was talking for the other person to hear as well.  She had brought her black one.  Was that OK? 

     He shouldn't blame himself.  Is that what kept him from calling?  And if he was blaming himself, was this handling it?  This was hardly the time.  She was the issue.  She was in no shape to take care of him.  Did he have to hear he was not to blame?  Would that make a difference?  Well then, he was not to blame.  Did he feel better, could she talk now?  Would he listen?  Or would he now stop even taking her calls?   Now that he was off the hook?  He could go back to his world.  A thousand pardons.  Forgive the intrusion.  Psychiatrists do quite well.  Their patients are a necessary inconvenience, otherwise what a wonderful world they live in.  Did he own any impressionists?  She preferred Cezanne.  The others were frivolous compared.  Did he have a summer place, in Buck's county maybe?  She bet he was a good driver.  She concurred with his selection of a BMW, no, she really wouldn't hear an alternative.  She simply wouldn't, she would put her hands over her ears before she would listen to such talk.  Did he think they should re-institute the scarlet letter?  These incarcerations flew by so fast, and then none the wiser.  All that wasted effort.  She would not be watching soap operas upon her dismissal and she doubted very much that her new friends would last.  The food was awful, the decor non-existent.  She might escape improvement altogether, unless she were reminded by a branding of some sort.  Otherwise she might be quite inconspicuous.  But, really, they were taught to be, but it was such a dilemma, suppressing pride but not leaving one so anonymous that one forgot one's responsibility and the privilege of being alive, about which one was already so nonchalant.

     She called him out of the habit of life. She just wanted to make it through these two weeks and be released, but she could not remain aloof.  She fell victim to the habits and reflexes of this redundant life.

     She knew what she was considered by looking at those stored in this place with her.  She did not have enough endurance to do anything but resist the immediate implications.  She was not planning on a future, she did not believe in a substance inside of this farce, a reason to endure the sham because of a promise of joy or love or cure.  The dimensions were fixed.  Her voice was cold with rage.  She was locked in with boring and ugly company as a punishment for failure.  He thought she was angry too because she had not been angry when she ended her life before, and she thought she was succumbing to debasement and her present anger, a low level of consciousness, was the proof.  She would be stuck in the coils of insult and retribution, constantly balancing the books, never clear of debt and finished with it as she had been before. 

     He did not know she was going to kill herself within three weeks.  She may have thought from the beginning that she had simply been interrupted and must wait this out, or she may have conceived it again as the only escape, the only privacy she had left, the only secret that held interest for her.  Maybe.  He believed, though, that it was not on her mind then, that the situation was too endlessly petty to earn escape, and suicide as it had been transcribed into pidgin in the group sessions was too enfeebled to survive outside the walls of this institution.   Suicide was able to be measured here, and it was smaller than the tedium and vandalizing boredom.  Suicide would not exceed the reach of deadened lives; it could not reach death, not anymore, and what death it might succeed in, had been polluted unto dismal. 

     She was on the public phone.  She did not whisper, everything she said was part of the continuum of the place.  The clinic had no limits; she expected him to already be privy to the narrative, plunged in it as they all were.  As soon as he picked up the phone he heard, "She's coming back right now.  She'll come right over here.  She's going to want to know your name.  I'm not going to tell her.  SSh.  Don't say anything.  She never combs her hair.  Deliberately, she doesn't want to get thrown out of here.  Here she is."   A commotion on the other side.  "None of your beeswax.  She's going to take the phone.  Don't breathe a word."

     A woman's beefy, threatening voice, full of phlegm but still brittle:  "You're not doing her any good.  You didn't, you know.  And now you're not giving her a chance to get better.  Maybe, you're afraid she will, then where would you be?  You should have some conscience, give her a chance.  She's supposed to concentrate on her work here and all you're doing is letting her continue with her lies.  It didn't work.  Won't you be satisfied till she's dead?  This is serious you know.  She tried to kill herself, she'd be dead if it was just for you.  Who do you think you are, risking her like this?  You just really don't give a shit, do you?  Me. Me. Me.  She's in trouble.  She looks like shit.  You wrung your little sweetheart almost clean out.  She's a fat faced mama san, don't you think maybe you've done enough already?  I'm sure she was just a pretty little wisp of a girl once upon a time, but she's a washed out dishrag now, and she better start facing it or she's never going to be anybody's heart throb again, least of all you, you self-righteous jerk.  Go ahead, it's your funeral."  

     Then Matsui's voice again:  "She's going over to sit on the chair and stare at me until I hang up the phone.  Then she'll follow me around.  She's in my group.  She's decided she can save my life.  She says I'm not facing who I am and if I don't I'll just kill myself again.  She's in and out of here all the time.  She's a funny color from the meds.  I can't get away, she thinks we're sisters. There's no privacy here.  I've got the wrong nightgown, too revealing.  If I called my super, do you think he could bring me my old Mother Hubbard flannel one.  He'd have no trouble finding it in my drawer, everything else is satin and silk".

     And then again,

     "It's TV time now.  Everybody is sitting around watching TV.  I never realized what shows they have on in the day.  There's one where people talk truth to the people who have hurt them in life, and then they hit them.  That's very popular here.  We're not well, so we're not allowed to hit one another, but we're anxious to get out where we can participate.  Day time TV is very generous to the ugly, I don't remember seeing them at night, anyway, not in serious roles.  We're all very grateful.  Someone said he thinks the worm is turning and the dogs will soon have their day.  Another thing to look forward to.  Uh-oh, she was not so absorbed as I thought.  I know she'll want to say a few words to you, just look at it as local color.  A weird yellowish-grey, puce I think.  Oh, everybody's wearing it."

     Again, the morning voice of the woman in her group, this time sinisterly sweet.

     "Is it you again, you patient ear.  She has a special place in her heart for you and we've all got to treat you better because she's so dear to us.  She keeps trying to withdraw from us, that's really the problem, and we love her so much.  The right word from you might help.  I've told her we're her family now, but she rejects us.  She thinks you're going to take her back.  She does.  I don't even think she remembers what that was.  But, a word from you now could save her so much pain later on.  Just tell her that suicidal Orientals are not your cup of tea.  Tell her how you always wanted a silky little lotus blossom sitting on your lap, and it just won't work with a bone crushing fat ass.  That would be so kind of you.  You know how you are, boychick, when you've run out of patience.  Remind her what it'll be when you're tired of being good."                                    She had called him at his office and at home.  Patients had this number for emergencies.  He had an answering machine.  When he heard her voice he would pick up the receiver.  He had recorded some of these calls.  She had killed herself a week after the last one.  He had called her when she was released from the clinic.  She had been home for a day. 

     "It's Doctor Mahler.  How are you?"

     "What?  I don't feel like talking.  I have to clean up.  I'm still cleaning up.  I don't feel like talking.  I have to do a lot of cleaning.  I don't want to talk here.  I don't want to talk to you here.  I have to clean this place up."

     "Of course.  We can talk later.  If you should feel like it.  I hope you're feeling better."

     "We can talk later.  Better later."

     They never spoke again. 

     She was more efficient this time.  She probably did not have enough pills remaining to do the job on their own, and she had learned that she had only so much time alone before an unanswered telephone would arouse suspicion.  This time she took enough pills to put her to sleep and tied a plastic bag over her head so she would suffocate in her sleep. 

     She did not leave a note, she hadn’t the first time either,but this time she had laid several books on Zen Buddhism on the bed near her, with a few paper markers between the pages.  To justify herself?  To relieve her friends of guilt over her aloneness by implying she had belief of something at the end or that, at least, she was too deluded to have really suffered?  Or, were the passages marked simply better written than she thought herself able to do at the time?  Manny thought a note must be difficult to reconcile with the act. While writing it the usual aggravating voices of vanity and hypocrisy would resume their twaddle, insulting resolve.  Few were left in this culture who might ever be certain of the unanimity of their decisions. 

     These tapes were as close to a voice from the grave as she was going to leave.  He could not follow her last steps, she might have reported them to him after the first time, but typically, those rescued after proving their last full measure of devotion had nothing revelatory to say; perhaps, like those spit back by the sea, their devotion had had the wrong flavor and they were not permitted entrance into the green gardens where mermaids sing.  

     But her physical presence which has materialized on listening to these tapes presses too closely into him to be ceded without a word to the blankness following her last words to him, and he cannot release this presence into vanishing dream stuff without putting some message on the long hour of tape that was never used. "We can talk later.  Better later", and he presses the record button to cover over that chasm:

     "A woman told me this story.  She was woken up by the telephone.  Very late.  After two in the morning.  `Elaine?  It's Terrance.'  Terance had died twenty years ago.  On stage.  He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert.  He had made love with every French professor he had had.  She was one of them.  `Terrance.  It's nice to hear from you.  How are things over there?' she asked.  He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out.  It had snuck up on him.  He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall.  All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes.  He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines.  A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away.  `I'm so happy for you, Terrance.  It sounds beautiful.  Blue skies.  I'm so relieved, I've stopped believing that was possible.  I hardly seem to care much about them here.  I didn't think I'd get that back.  Oh, I hope so, I hope I didn't put if off too long.'  He answered, `You didn't.  We didn't.  The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.'  `What a surprise.  I've grown resigned.  I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway.  So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest.  Grey clouds sounded much more like it.  Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky.  We all miss you.'  `But, that's why I called.  I miss you.  I think it was the sun coming back.  I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were.  For me.  You could be.  You're so generous.  You can't help it.  I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing.  A light on everything, I was thinking, and you came to mind.  You know, the sun was warming my pants, I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up.  What are you wearing?'  `Terrance.  You mustn't think that way.  Not there.  It's too sad.  It's awful.  To still think that way.  They should never have stopped the rain.  I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame.  It must be a dream.  We must be allowed to forget.  I'll pray for you.  I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back.  And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me.  It's so unseemly of me.  You're just a boy.  And I miss you.  So, unfair.  I've got to let you go.  But, it's harder now than it was before.  It's all I have left.  It's got to be a sin to summon the dead.  But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you.  Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now.  You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone.  Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.'

     Well, it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but Terrance on sabbatical in Florence, separated by seven hours and a few months of blessed silence after a year of venomous spiffs.  Terrance with the skinny legs and bad breath.  That Terrance, the one whose co-habitation inside the name of the musician had struck her as grotesque, and who then served as one of those messengers in dreams who always seem to be wearing disguises.  I've told you the story.It did happen, I've added to it, it scared her.  She was brave conversing with the dead when she was still groggy, she just continued the conversation in the spell of dreaming when such things can seem normal.  But she became superstitious when repeating it to me and stopped abruptly, afraid we were being overheard.  I told it to you to remind you how the living always have an ear cocked to the dead.  We shouldn't think it is illicit, or ominous.  Please, it's a thing of sunny days.  You've probably forgotten, but we have always heard your dead voices whispering through the leaves, even in sunlight. 

     Do you have a spare moment?  You know, it is not that far from my office to the East River.  When I get the chance, I walk there.  There's a park around Gracie Mansion.  I walk through it.  I'd like you to come along.  Do you like pigeons?  Everybody is obligated not to.  I've always liked them.  Maybe, you would understand that more.  They live here as if we don't, that might seem prescient to you.  Maybe, you see them more clearly than you see us.  Especially when they fly.  Maybe, you're fooled into thinking they belong with you.  When I was a kid I spent too much time alone.  You are familiar to me.  I think we should be on these terms, I imagine you along with me.  It's quite natural to us.  Your absence, it's familiar to me, from empty mirrors.  I could enter the space where my shadow lived.  And look out.   Did you know, Matsui, that beauty carries that space inside it?  Doesn't that change everything between us?  Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them?  Did you hear them more personally?  Did you?  If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you?  I don't believe you can hear any of this, by now you're dust.  Am I here to say good-bye at last?  But, it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with, that the rest of us learn  we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled  will be eternal.  There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."

     He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.  

     He nodded off.  A minute later he wakes, saying what?  What?  into the dark room.  He cannot remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhowette with outflung arms cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him, and he does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.                  

                    

 

       

                                         

 

     

  

 

                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two Japanese-Americans.  Did they have to have known you at all?  Did they?  As it turned out, two weeks.  Did they know you?  Your friends.  Or not? "

     "They were trying to be helpful."

     "Not glib?"

     "They were trying to be helpful.  He is a lawyer.  Highly successful.  They like him.  It was for him, too.  He was looking for someone too.  Most are already married.  It seemed like good fortune."

     "Little Benny."     

     He can hear her gasp on the tape, he knows she has covered her mouth with her hand, he remembers that, her eyes wide, an actor's gesture of shock, and now comes her laughter, like water falling from pool to pool, or like glass breaking, a quality to it, not the sound, but the purity, the icy reserve, breaking apart, falling to pieces shard by tinkling shard.  The laugh encouraged bravery, it relished mischief.  It was ready to be shocked and delighted in it.  It invited one to take a chance.  It would be rewarded.  He had made her recite the beginnings of her affairs.  They had all begun precipitously.  She was always finally grabbed. 

     He is making her repeat a story in this tape.  He already knows it.  He is leading her towards one part of it.  He anticipates it now.  He did then.

     "You should have known, introducing himself that way.  Bernard might have been different.  Just what you might have needed for rescue.  So, not such good fortune.  Because..."

     "It was unsatisfactory."

     "Yes?"

     "It was not satisfactory."

     "Couldn't you say you were not satisfied?  Yes?  You were not satisfied."

     "I was not satisfied."

     "And why not?"

     "We have discussed this."

     "And you are still saying `it' was unsatisfactory, so I feel as if we haven't talked about it at all.  You knew from the beginning.  It was not a general malaise, didn't you?  Because you went to your apartment.  At that point you were still ready to give it a go, or maybe it was just easier or maybe you might show him a thing or two and your friends, and just maybe, who knows, maybe you'll get a surprise.  So, be complete, let's see what we turn up.  He is in your apartment."

     "He is in my apartment."

     "And?  Are the lights off?  Did you have drinks?  Tell me what you were wearing.  You have to make an effort.  The medications come in conjunction with an effort."

     "I wore a black dress.  We kissed right away.  Why else would I invite him in?  But he goes looking for a closet to hang his coat.  When his arms are caught in the sleeves-he tried shrugging it off both shoulders at once and I know he is too nervous if he is doing that. He is a highly successful lawyer, and the back of the coat is flopped over the two sleeves and he is pinned, he'll have to gyrate, and I kissed him then because I think I lost patience."

     "You were not touched, perhaps, by his nervousness?"

     "He looks stupid.  It's exasperating.  I don't want to see it anymore.  He's a monkey in that coat.  Ben-ny.   Ben-ny.   Why doesn't he know how to take off a coat?   He can't even put his arms around me.  He turned away.  He is embarrassed.  He is always going to be ashamed."

     "And you?"

     "I am not ashamed.  He is silly."

     "And that's when you touched him, wasn't it?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "What's he there for, anyway?"

     "Because nothing else is left.  No other reason by now for him to be there, so let's get it over with, or what?"

     "He's just silly.  Glum as a plum.  All night already I have listened to his serious talk.  Too boring.  I am tired of being humble daughter.  I don't want to hear one more word."

     "This will shut him up."

     "Oh, yes.  He still can't get his arms out of the coat.  I drop his pants down, too.  He has on boxer shorts.  Then I go to the bedroom."

     "You left him there with his pants around his ankles."

     "Let him show courage."

     "Did you think he would follow?"

     "Eventually."

     "You didn't care, already?"

     "I went to the bathroom to prepare."

     "But, you knew there was no point to it already.  You had..."

     "I had courage for us both.  Kicking him out would be rude.  I am a civilized woman.  He should learn to take off his coat and to not talk like a student.  He is a highly successful lawyer."

     "But, when you had him in your hand, you already knew this would not go on long."

     The gasp and laugh again. 

     "You would not have continued, even if you found other reasons.  No other reasons would have been sufficient to overcome that, (he hears himself cough, again, his throat had obviously become dry) aberration."

     "I treated him with courtesy."

     "He never knew.  But, you were firm.  You broke it off."

     Her laugh again. 

     "You had him in your hand.  Why didn't you?  Why did you drag things out?"

     "That would have been bad manners."

     "What did he do when you touched him?"

     "The man always becomes serious then.  He was concentrated."

     "You don't remember anything else, about him?"

     She laughed.

     "He moaned.  Men are very Gothic then."

     "He didn't say anything?  That you remember."

     "For once he did not say anything."

     "They do sometimes, don't they?"

     "Sometimes."

     "The first time?"

     "Sometimes."

     "You can't remember?"

     "I love you.  Gibberish."

     "Never anything you believe."

     "It is not the time to extract promises."

     "You've never known at that moment, this is different?  This one is special?"

     She laughed again.   

     His voice again, taut.  Reacting to her laugh.  She has swung away from what he wanted.  He is leading her back.

     "Maybe, you laugh when you become uncomfortable.  When you begin to see yourself in what you are doing.  That might be the place for our most valuable work.  Let's concentrate at that point.  We should try bringing to consciousness what you bury there.  We left him with his pants tangled around his ankles, a belittling situation for him to find himself in, but he doesn't just find himself there, you've put him there and yet all that has been skipped.  What is your part in this?  You undid his pants, you remember very well the result of what you did, enjoy it, I think, but don't take responsibility for it.  So, try again. "    

     "Try again?'

     "Exactly."

     "Again. Grr.  Too boring."

     "Avoidance.  From when you kissed him."

     "I did not kiss him."

     "He is taking off his coat."

     "I didn't kiss him for that.  He looks too stupid.  He has no manners.  He is unsophisticated."

     He remembers how she would stretch before she was forced into digging into these memories, or before she made them up for him.  She would sit up.  And she would do small calisthenics with her neck and shoulders to loosen them up.  It was a strange body language, ritualistic and probably adopted from her father, who walked about with rocks on his back to strengthen his heart.  She would roll her shoulders, and lean her head back and turn it side to side.  Then she would begin, looking at him at the head of the couch, testing the story, perhaps, before laying back down.  When he remembers the calisthenics, he remembers how incongruously mechanical they were in her body which was so completely female, not zaftig, but a body where the femaleness was spread evenly, where joints were rounded together and her skin, for all its want of bosom and haunch, was suffused with luxuriousness and seamless smoothness.  The arm rowing, the head swaying, she might have been a child imitating a man.  Maybe, a child called on to join an adult activity and following the whole ritual without knowing which parts were critical.

     "You didn't kiss him.  You grabbed him."

     "Ah.  Yes?  I did not grab him.  His stomach is sticking out.  Like a little boy.  I patted his stomach, he's got a little pot belly, I stuck a finger through his shirt, but he has his pants too high, covering his belly button.  He's going to put his coat back on?  Or what is he going to do?  So, I undid his belt.  He's in boxer underwear.  Hopeless."

     "The pants just drop off when you unfasten the belt?  You're running through this again.  Take more time."

     "Uh-huh.  Of course.  Of course, I had to unzip him.  Right?  Uh-huh.  Carefully, I don't want him to get caught.  I hold him inside so he will not get caught.  Push him down.  He is wearing tailored pants, if he goes to the courtroom he must wear these pants.  They have a button inside so the fly goes right down because the pants do not spread.  I have to unbutton that button, also.  Right?  Right.  He's peeking through the fly.  Sure.  I give it a pinch.  In fun.  It's not such a tragedy.  Let's go.  OK?"

     "You've skipped over your disappointment.  We know there was that.  But, then his feelings.  What did you notice?  He didn't say anything?"

     "Too fast.  I have to hold him down so the zipper will not bite him.  He does not want to go down.  I am firm about this for his own good.  I am responsible for his well-being.  I have him completely in my hand, too bad, but he must be nervous, so I squeeze him, maybe that's not just right, I just squeeze the end with two fingers, is that better?, or I can put my thumb below the glans, it's like a little hat, and I can press there, a...a, below the glans, and hold it around, or? Or, just squeeze it a little, just with my fingertips. Until he makes some noises, grumph, grumph, Mr. Attorney, maybe.  Maybe not.  I can hear him breathing.  Like he has been running and wants to keep quiet?"

     "No protest?  Maybe, you didn't notice.  One might expect, his pants at his ankles, some protest.  A word perhaps.  His hands are tied.  And then he's hobbled by the pants, and there is your competency, this is all happening without a hitch, so to speak.  Practiced routine, he's the unrehearsed element, as far as he can see.  He might protest that, being a push over so to speak.  A word.  One would expect it.  If you are truly engaged, you would likely remember him uttering the word.  Maybe, quite personal, or feeling that way, even if the word were not personnel at all. Just a word, but that instant, a plea. For the very reason nothing personnel can work, could possibly be understood, whether it was in his own language or in no language at all, not really able to be put into words, this plea to be taken personnel. And so he only has the one word which has to say all this and can't and really isn't a word at all when he says it, because he doesn't want you to hear it as you always have before, but only as it's coming from him, new, or very old, but out of him only and not some common currency.  If you were to carefully remember that time, if you had been more careful, I think you would remember that word."

     "If I was more careful. He said nothing."

     "Nothing?  Did he?  I don't think so.  It's hard for me to imagine him then believing in that nihilism.  I doubt he could have believed, just then, on his quick demise in your life.  He would be misinterpreting, thinking either he is irresistible, or at least touching in his awkwardness.  Not receiving the implied insult in your shop-lifting of this misplaced article.  I think instead, some totally inappropriate gravity.  Try to remember.  The tone should help you, it would have been as clangorous as the screams of someone deaf.  Think."

     "He didn't say anything."

    "I see, your construction before was artificial.  I missed that.  Theatrical even.  He said nothing.  Well, one of us certainly has been deaf this hour."

     "No. No. No. I have been listening."

     "Yes. Yes you have.  Just then you had it, didn't you?  I heard it.  You heard it at last.  You made it your own.  It was there but you didn't know it until it broke open in you, and then there it is, loud and clear, as if you had your ear to his heart.  "No, no, no".  His protest at being robbed of the chance of bringing to you a unique generosity, maybe we can name it charity, because at this moment of misinterpretation, he feels full enough that what he wishes to give has the size of unity sublime, soul mate, nothing less, and that is charity.  If one wished to carry this on, hearing that "no, no, no" as if he were still speaking it, entering into that suspended minute with him, I think we would see slipping away from him a chance to forgive himself forever the loathing which has kept him separate from his own heart.  Right then, I suspect, your being Japanese was like the closed door of a mirror suddenly opening and falling through into every answer ever asked."

     Silence during which the granulations in the air are recorded along with some relaying through the wooden desk of the sounds that strum through the ground.  Then,

     "I don't let him go.  No, I won't do this.  I hold him, oh, and he says, "no, no, no" but I am holding him, my hand is not so strong but for this I know it will be strong enough to be kind.  Very gentle, I remember, very sweet, it's good, very careful.  No need to worry, it's all right, OK, OK.  Oh. Oh. Oh."        

     Manny cringes when he listens to the tape of this session, shaking his head.  He has always been more interactive with his patients than is traditional in orthodox psychoanalysis, often interspersing sessions of free association on the couch with interpretive dialogues where he and the patient sit facing each other and evaluate the course of the treatment and reach agreements on progress and strategy.  But this herding of Matsui cannot be veiled as collaboration in treatment.  He can only spare himself by believing he had no choice himself, that he was more driven than driving and that the explanations he was brow-beating her with to force her compliance and which are so transparently rationalizations for an obsessive motive at the time were not understood by him.  But then...Certainly she knew.  He hears her designing her monologues to satisfy him, sometimes testing them word by word to see if they fit his obsession, tacking in mid-course to follow his lead.  And then this...tape after tape labeled Matsui which put on the machine turn out to have been erased or recorded over, the unbearable record of erotic pandering expunged.  Sometimes a fragment is left.  He must have erased them in wildly swinging moods, sometimes cold with icy resolve and other times in fits of agony, destroying the voice he regretted losing.  And Matsui, knowing the contract, familiar with it from her experiences with men and her ready objectification in their eyes, her ability to become an ideal form for them, dressing with ever increasing consistency for his pleasure, measuring his response until she knew without his ever having to say it that childish exhibitions of sexuality aroused him, innocently exposed chaste cotton underwear, coltish gestures and huge sighs of theatrical  exasperation, knowing the conditions under which she would continue getting her drugs.  

     Under cover of one tape labeled Matsui, a telephone conversation with Daniel, his son, when he left his wife some years back to become a jazz pianist.  Why recorded on the tape?  To make a record over this unbearable evidence that he had been a responsible father?  Aware of the text it was covering with every word spoken, he hears himself deliberate and concerned, altruistic, offering to pick his son up from the transient hotel he is staying at in Hartford and drive him home to his wife, offering as well to speak to her, smooth the waters, and accepting without protest Daniel's sarcastic provocations and accusations, accepting them with therapeutic or patriarchal patience.  "I thought it was cement glue.  OK, so that's the route-sniff that crap and drop the vocabulary.  I'd learn the blues. But that's semen stuck on the door.  These guys sit on the toilet and jerk off.  That's the blues and I can't do it. I'm calling you collect.  I'm going back to my room to jerk off with the covers up to my neck.  Too much romance.  This is for us dad.  For you.  You'll see, we're gonna hug like men when this is over, without a word, two dumb animals with sad eyes, god damn it.  At last.  Cleaned out"...and then that spastic break when what was recorded over resumes... "Let's see you.  Start again.  Carefully.  In front of the mirror, begin there, see yourself."

     "O-o-oh. Oh.  I do that before I put on the dress. When I get out of the shower.  Before I put on my brassiere, black tonight."

     Her voice: From the start he had noticed a ventriloquistic quality in it.  She was away from the spot where the voice originated, in mood and vantage.  She had beautiful, full lips, and her mechanics of speaking were opulent.  Each syllable was molded through a kiss.  The result was a precision that was also lush, a topiary trimming.  Her voice was slightly mechanical, there even seemed to be rusty places on it, these were where anger abraded it into scratchy hoarseness, but for the most part it had the frictionless, flensed perfection of silver joints.  

   Her voice was hypnotic for him.  He was trained in hypnosis.  The voice is essential to the technique.  It should be seamless, without hesitations, preferably silky or felt-like, a little sing-song.  An incantation.  What the hypnotist creates is a voice without inflection or personality, without the ability to clash and arouse.  Freud said the dream functions to keep the sleeper asleep. That was the voice desired.  Only audible to an inner ear, the sable echo of one's own inner voice. 

     What would sex be like for her?  There would be passion, not emotion or feeling, these would seem mere fretwork compared to the rescue of a soul-a weight that severe and perilous. But, temperance. Not reserve, but an ordained futility.  At the very moment of recovery, of solid arrival: Futility.  An instant fading.  What would he feel through his arms?  A shocking lightness, her arrival when completed already including her withdrawal.  No sooner would she surely be in her lover's arms than he would feel the imported emptiness, the echoless stillness accompanying her return: The substance of her dreamless soul.   Without residue of gratitude or recognition for him.   And in most cases this was all that he would sense.  But for some, some few, given the endless time to see without being scrutinized by her pure blank stare-he might see the greater alienation from experience and affection and warmth and memory and terror, and even see as well her acclimation to those states of non-self from where she had just returned. 

     One lover in ten, perhaps, would know the chill, so immediate to him, was final and infinite.  He would know it for that brief time before he was captured again.  While beholding her in a catastrophe as great as birth or death, only the fatal proximity to such larger event pushing him outside of the act for brief moments to actually behold her apart before her instinctual sexual assaying noted his distance and took him in again, took him absolutely: The inclusion of the male to his very fiber, to his all, and in that all, the blank, frozen awe at futures begun and ended here and now and beyond.  Only briefly might he witness her aloft or buried.  How would this look to him, this fusion of opposites? A trembling quietude he could not interpret?  A humming in her he could feel, shivers and tremors, nearness to a density that might sink him like an anvil, but which embraced her?  No flailing, no writhing, no protest or pain or drama in her, no space left outside the grip on her for these things to occupy.  He could only guess at the distinction between burial and flight as she passed through the absolute deeps...seeing the angelic torpor and disinterest of the creature aloft over the fathomless: Her ecstasy without rapture, that erasure of emptiness inside itself that was her sought for release, this dissolution of soul into its origins and end in vacuum. 

     Before she required him again  ("Several ways to remind the man if his mind is wandering"), and Manny had her enumerate because he required from her grace and mastery, it was around these that his hope centered, in his transparent possession of her sexual genius, her instrumentality, out of which she had already been removed. 

     She deteriorated with the continued use of medications.    She said she was suicidal and the drugs were all that were keeping her alive.  He thought it likely that she threatened suicide to get the drugs.  She had the strategies of an addict.  She began speaking like a junkie, long pauses in which it seemed the machinery of the brain had simply stopped or as if she had forgotten what she was saying or could no longer make sense of language.  She blanked out.  Once, her silences had impressed him; they were evidence of this mastery of hers, her lack of excitement and her assurance, or the absolutism at her center.  Now, stupidities echoed from the dead space, as if he were overhearing the testimonials of ex-alcoholics and addicts from a twelve step program, as if one of those bare rooms with the circle of folding chairs had been implanted in her breast.  She repeated the cant she heard from her friends who by this time, it appeared, had streamlined the chore of talking to her into a corner man's spurring of will. 

     Her descent was a relief to him, at first.  He was sure he had fallen out of love with her.  Because of the drugs it was probably too late for him ever to actually be a good therapist for her, but at least he was no longer acting out of repressed desire. After all, she bored him.  She even disgusted him.  But then, the disgust became exciting.  It made him the slightest bit drunk, gave him a buzz.  Her abused body permitted him a sloppy exuberance.  He need not be so careful.  His feelings were not tangled any more.  Her beauty had made him delicate or deferential or petulant, at times.  Now, he was aroused and fascinated by the dandruff and psoriasis she developed, by the intimacy seeing them gave to him.  Dry white spittle lodged at the corners of her mouth.

     He sat beside her on the couch, she had begun surrendering to slovenly sobs, two ribbons of glistening mucous ran from her nose.  He put an arm around her and comforted her.  Her sobs were a chugging labor.  He stroked her hair.  It was coarser than he expected.  She seemed pregnant, as abducted by the mundane as a pregnant woman, and like a pregnant woman afflicted and somehow disposed of and despised, trapped in a form which seemed punished and benighted.  She was not pregnant, he did not feel towards her what he felt for a pregnant woman, but there were more than inklings of it.  He looked at her larded thighs, naked because her tights no longer fit.  They would slog and trudge.  He had the lover's feeling of being dragged along into earthy tasks, of getting hitched to the plow.  He reveled in this loss of aesthetics.  His ethical sense, even his moral sense, lapsed in this squalor.  He had never liked the denning part of marriage with Florence, the plowed earth musk of dirty diapers and the filling of the apartment with female flesh, its emissions and diurnal rhythms.  But, now he could enjoy a domestic seediness.  He patted her thigh, its nakedness was no longer luminous.  She was part of the soiled world.  He squeezed her flaccid arm, her head lolled onto his shoulder.

     "Take some simple steps.  It wouldn't hurt to spend a day cleaning your apartment.  And doing a wash.  Odors cling to clothes."

     "I can't wear any of my clothes anymore.  Just these."  

     She stuck out her tongue, a white film adhered to it. 

     "Hygiene is important.  There's no exemption.  It's unfortunate, being ill should be enough, but the clock is still ticking.  At middle age the body's chemistry begins to change.  It's noticeable.  For poets, artists, martyrs, unless they're saints."

     Her eyes sometimes rolled back in her head like a doll's.  Their heaviness had seemed part of the erotic anomie he imagined for her, weighted by witness and verdict.  By the end, they seemed dumb as oxen's.  He sat next to her on the couch at the end of the session, not every session, just a few, enough to make it seem normal to him, until it did, and he could do it without stage fright, plop down next to her like she was a passenger on a bus, with as little regard, holding her prescription in one hand.  Times for refills were the opportunities he picked to sit beside her, holding the paper out of her reach, not deliberately, but as if it was demeaning for him to deal with, until she had to ask for it, which she could not do right away, not until he had perhaps stroked her hair, lifting it at last off the nape and brushing the chaste saddle of skin that stretched across the string of vertebrae, and then she would remind him, and he would look startled, as if she had said something impolite, as if the whole topic was, or she had not been listening, as if the paper in his hand was un-pocketed change she was asking for. 

     Later, over the years since her suicide, he realizes something else had evolved in him during her rapid decline.  Rather than falling out of love with her a physical commiseration had grown in him.  He did not recognize it at the time, it seemed to him that all he did was abuse her abandoned body, but later, listening to the tapes, he found that the opportunities he had taken to touch her, to sit close enough to her to insure that her opiated body would lean heavily against him, now made him physically miss her, to miss that real weight, even the remembered stale and chemical odors that hung about her.  Her drugged state had allowed him to gain an intimacy with her, and losing that intimacy turned out to be the greatest part of his grief, while the loss of her beauty and with it his cursed intoxication with her has faded in importance.  At the time her beauty had seemed an emblem of a governing order to the world based on cruelty and power, and when it paled it seemed a vindication of this principal's ruthless precedence over life, and now he cannot make that seem significant compared to her single death. 

     She had reported an early attempt at suicide.  It was too stylized to have been sincere; she had been at an age of artistic excess, twenty years ago, her expectations were lyrical, a state of temper he did not see her as capable of anymore.  Besides, she had only gone through the preparations: Ran the bath water, laid the safety razor on the edge, climbed into the tub, and toyed with the hallucinogenic changes her resolution had brought to everything she saw or thought.  Finally, her boyfriend at the time barged in to use the toilet and broke the spell.  She had to tell him what had been going on or he would never have noticed, and it was immediately impossible for her to recapture the insouciant nostalgia she had been feeling toward life, which could have been proof of her actual nearness to the act.  All she had left was a simple arithmetic to measure her proximity, the half hour or so the clock had parsed off before her boyfriend's entrance.  Had her will already been weakening, was that already too long a hesitation?  Or too short a period to balance against other gaps of boredom and passive aggression that were part of a normal day?   

     She reported to Manny that during the week since her last appointment she had spent a night sharpening a knife.  Her somewhat boyfriend was visiting. Manny had heard of him before.  They had not been able to decide on a title for him.  They never had sex, the medicines had effectively spaded her, but he was available for moral support at any time.  He was relieved, Manny thought by the lessor culpability which came with no longer being her lover.  It seemed to Manny that his main goal at this time was to slip away on tip-toe with her still balanced upright, at least until he left the room.  He thought, too, that she used him for a straw dog for Manny and their therapeutic relationship.     

     "He doesn't want sex either.  He is much happier now that I'm a fat girl so he has a reason.  He's feeling much better.  He was a problematic performer, but so elegant and attentive when apologizing that I can't lose him.  He does errands.  He wants to act like we're married and don't have to fuck anymore, thank god.  He likes me better fat and ugly because he is so loyal now.  We're so boring.  We don't say anything anymore.  Since we don't sleep together he can be smug.  I don't dress for him.  I'm so fat now, and I see it excites him.  It was too competitive for him before, now he is doing me a big favor.  He wants to do favors and be superior.  He wants to please, maybe he needs a mommy.  We're married all right.  We're so boring together.  He's so pontifical.  He talks on and on.  What is he saying?  He wants to touch me now.  He's always patting me like a buddy, every chance he gets.  Yack.  Yack.  Yack.  I'll be all right, he's saying.  I've got to be strong.  Don't give up.  What did he tell me once?  I have too many secrets because my parents were in an internment camp.  I'm trying too hard to not be Japanese.  I'm ashamed. Like all survivors.  I should be Japanese.  What's he mean?  He wants to touch me now that it would be such a favor and he would be my savior.  He's getting horny.  In our trashy life he can be horny.  He feels like a prince down there.  Japanese.  I've had Jewish boy friends.  They all want me to be the first Jew.  They always think everybody else is in the Golden Age while they're too smart to get in.  He thinks he looks Eurasian.  From the Middle East, but the Japanese are more perfect.  I showed him Japanese, all night I sharpened the knife and he comes in and out of the kitchen sputtering and can't leave because he doesn't know who the knife is for.  He should see himself then.  He's got no place with his Japanese Medea, ah, ah, ah, ah, flapping his arms, caw, caw, caw."

     Listening to this uncommon harangue by her, usually she sat stonily or sniveled, Manny thought the contemplation of suicide had had its usual tonic effect, clearing the mind and restoring pride of purpose, and thought it had already served and was not really a threat anymore, and that furthermore it had allowed her to take a shot at him; since he had not prevented her from swerving so close to the edge she had in effect out-argued or out-smarted and eluded him.   

     And then, on his watch, she tried again, and it was only the intervention of her friends that saved her.  They grew uneasy whenever she lingered in a bathroom in a restaurant.  She was so fixated on suicide, talking of nothing else, that she had lost a woman's privilege to dawdle over her toilette while the rest of the table hangs fire, and when she failed to answer her telephone on a morning when she should have been awake for work-she was maniacal about schedules, she seemed to have lost any memory of their context or reason, but depended on rolling along in their ruts-they roused the super to open her door with a key.      

     She was laying on the bed, dressed for a chilly evening's stroll in pants and cashmere sweater, whether out of modesty or a consideration for death's chill approach they wondered, and felt guilty for wondering since it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking standing over her body.  And more bitchily still, noticing that she had on her black boots, which tipped the balance to image and vanity.

     Her friends on guard that day were a couple.  The vigil rotated, friends spelling friends.  Manny got the report from the husband who had met Matsui through his wife.  He was handling her temporal affairs one of which was informing the shrink, while his wife visited Matsui at the clinic where a man would be a sullen encumbrance.  The consensus was that Manny was to blame and this fellow plowed into Manny over the phone with the gusto which comes with relief.  He had been chaffing under the rule of righteously sad women finally completely in their element. 

     Manny waited out his initial exuberance, and bogged him down in documenting what might be called medical details or psychological clues, all of them useless and tedious, but not incidentally forcing the guy to confess his morbid curiosity and a spiking of arousal the body in its state of sedated debauchery had caused him.  And confess, too, the frenzied gossip they were all enjoying in the aftermath of the attempt. Its religious timbre and invigorated purpose.  And a sense all of them had gained of being rare and imperiled and wiser.         

     She had left neat and resolved, with her house dusted and polished, dishes washed and stacked in their cabinets, clothes folded in their drawers, in that state of mature detachment a suicide often gains at the end, and she was dragged back as a frazzled ruin and thrown in with other wrecks to endure a two week remedial course in how to live normally. 

     Manny did not visit her at the clinic.  She was under the care of the house rehabilitation experts.  The details of the perverse turn his therapy had taken would not be revealed or believed.  The testimony of suicides is disregarded: Their interpretations have failed the most basic test of keeping them alive.  A tacit superiority is felt towards them.  Insincerity and manipulation is assumed.  The treatments pointedly ignore or drown out in tuneless rhetoric any suggestion that the suicide may have opposed the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, that he might have shown gallantry and sober courage or conclusive judgement or had turned a cold eye on life and death.  They were treated as victims of their emotions with crippled intelligence.  In this institution of sandbox group therapy, her lost sessions with Manny had the aspect of romance, and she phoned out to him when she could and attacked and plead like an ex-lover. 

     Wasn't he going to call her?  He wasn't going to just abandon her, was he?  How could he?  He couldn't just run away.  Look what he had done.  He couldn't just pretend he didn't know.  Why didn't he call?  Didn't he have a medical responsibility?  Did she embarrass him now?  And then: She was losing weight. 

     He could hear the television in the background.  The telephone was in the common room.  She had a sneering mockery in her voice then, she asked him what color nightgowns he preferred.  Someone else was waiting to use the phone, perhaps to call their own shrink, he could sense she was talking for the other person to hear as well.  She had brought her black one.  Was that OK? 

     He shouldn't blame himself.  Is that what kept him from calling?  And if he was blaming himself, was this handling it?  This was hardly the time.  She was the issue.  She was in no shape to take care of him.  Did he have to hear he was not to blame?  Would that make a difference?  Well then, he was not to blame.  Did he feel better, could she talk now?  Would he listen?  Or would he now stop even taking her calls?   Now that he was off the hook?  He could go back to his world.  A thousand pardons.  Forgive the intrusion.  Psychiatrists do quite well.  Their patients are a necessary inconvenience, otherwise what a wonderful world they live in.  Did he own any impressionists?  She preferred Cezanne.  The others were frivolous compared.  Did he have a summer place, in Buck's county maybe?  She bet he was a good driver.  She concurred with his selection of a BMW, no, she really wouldn't hear an alternative.  She simply wouldn't, she would put her hands over her ears before she would listen to such talk.  Did he think they should re-institute the scarlet letter?  These incarcerations flew by so fast, and then none the wiser.  All that wasted effort.  She would not be watching soap operas upon her dismissal and she doubted very much that her new friends would last.  The food was awful, the decor non-existent.  She might escape improvement altogether, unless she were reminded by a branding of some sort.  Otherwise she might be quite inconspicuous.  But, really, they were taught to be, but it was such a dilemma, suppressing pride but not leaving one so anonymous that one forgot one's responsibility and the privilege of being alive, about which one was already so nonchalant.

     She called him out of the habit of life. She just wanted to make it through these two weeks and be released, but she could not remain aloof.  She fell victim to the habits and reflexes of this redundant life.

     She knew what she was considered by looking at those stored in this place with her.  She did not have enough endurance to do anything but resist the immediate implications.  She was not planning on a future, she did not believe in a substance inside of this farce, a reason to endure the sham because of a promise of joy or love or cure.  The dimensions were fixed.  Her voice was cold with rage.  She was locked in with boring and ugly company as a punishment for failure.  He thought she was angry too because she had not been angry when she ended her life before, and she thought she was succumbing to debasement and her present anger, a low level of consciousness, was the proof.  She would be stuck in the coils of insult and retribution, constantly balancing the books, never clear of debt and finished with it as she had been before. 

     He did not know she was going to kill herself within three weeks.  She may have thought from the beginning that she had simply been interrupted and must wait this out, or she may have conceived it again as the only escape, the only privacy she had left, the only secret that held interest for her.  Maybe.  He believed, though, that it was not on her mind then, that the situation was too endlessly petty to earn escape, and suicide as it had been transcribed into pidgin in the group sessions was too enfeebled to survive outside the walls of this institution.   Suicide was able to be measured here, and it was smaller than the tedium and vandalizing boredom.  Suicide would not exceed the reach of deadened lives; it could not reach death, not anymore, and what death it might succeed in, had been polluted unto dismal. 

     She was on the public phone.  She did not whisper, everything she said was part of the continuum of the place.  The clinic had no limits; she expected him to already be privy to the narrative, plunged in it as they all were.  As soon as he picked up the phone he heard, "She's coming back right now.  She'll come right over here.  She's going to want to know your name.  I'm not going to tell her.  SSh.  Don't say anything.  She never combs her hair.  Deliberately, she doesn't want to get thrown out of here.  Here she is."   A commotion on the other side.  "None of your beeswax.  She's going to take the phone.  Don't breathe a word."

     A woman's beefy, threatening voice, full of phlegm but still brittle:  "You're not doing her any good.  You didn't, you know.  And now you're not giving her a chance to get better.  Maybe, you're afraid she will, then where would you be?  You should have some conscience, give her a chance.  She's supposed to concentrate on her work here and all you're doing is letting her continue with her lies.  It didn't work.  Won't you be satisfied till she's dead?  This is serious you know.  She tried to kill herself, she'd be dead if it was just for you.  Who do you think you are, risking her like this?  You just really don't give a shit, do you?  Me. Me. Me.  She's in trouble.  She looks like shit.  You wrung your little sweetheart almost clean out.  She's a fat faced mama san, don't you think maybe you've done enough already?  I'm sure she was just a pretty little wisp of a girl once upon a time, but she's a washed out dishrag now, and she better start facing it or she's never going to be anybody's heart throb again, least of all you, you self-righteous jerk.  Go ahead, it's your funeral."  

     Then Matsui's voice again:  "She's going over to sit on the chair and stare at me until I hang up the phone.  Then she'll follow me around.  She's in my group.  She's decided she can save my life.  She says I'm not facing who I am and if I don't I'll just kill myself again.  She's in and out of here all the time.  She's a funny color from the meds.  I can't get away, she thinks we're sisters. There's no privacy here.  I've got the wrong nightgown, too revealing.  If I called my super, do you think he could bring me my old Mother Hubbard flannel one.  He'd have no trouble finding it in my drawer, everything else is satin and silk".

     And then again,

     "It's TV time now.  Everybody is sitting around watching TV.  I never realized what shows they have on in the day.  There's one where people talk truth to the people who have hurt them in life, and then they hit them.  That's very popular here.  We're not well, so we're not allowed to hit one another, but we're anxious to get out where we can participate.  Day time TV is very generous to the ugly, I don't remember seeing them at night, anyway, not in serious roles.  We're all very grateful.  Someone said he thinks the worm is turning and the dogs will soon have their day.  Another thing to look forward to.  Uh-oh, she was not so absorbed as I thought.  I know she'll want to say a few words to you, just look at it as local color.  A weird yellowish-grey, puce I think.  Oh, everybody's wearing it."

     Again, the morning voice of the woman in her group, this time sinisterly sweet.

     "Is it you again, you patient ear.  She has a special place in her heart for you and we've all got to treat you better because she's so dear to us.  She keeps trying to withdraw from us, that's really the problem, and we love her so much.  The right word from you might help.  I've told her we're her family now, but she rejects us.  She thinks you're going to take her back.  She does.  I don't even think she remembers what that was.  But, a word from you now could save her so much pain later on.  Just tell her that suicidal Orientals are not your cup of tea.  Tell her how you always wanted a silky little lotus blossom sitting on your lap, and it just won't work with a bone crushing fat ass.  That would be so kind of you.  You know how you are, boychick, when you've run out of patience.  Remind her what it'll be when you're tired of being good."                                    She had called him at his office and at home.  Patients had this number for emergencies.  He had an answering machine.  When he heard her voice he would pick up the receiver.  He had recorded some of these calls.  She had killed herself a week after the last one.  He had called her when she was released from the clinic.  She had been home for a day. 

     "It's Doctor Mahler.  How are you?"

     "What?  I don't feel like talking.  I have to clean up.  I'm still cleaning up.  I don't feel like talking.  I have to do a lot of cleaning.  I don't want to talk here.  I don't want to talk to you here.  I have to clean this place up."

     "Of course.  We can talk later.  If you should feel like it.  I hope you're feeling better."

     "We can talk later.  Better later."

     They never spoke again. 

     She was more efficient this time.  She probably did not have enough pills remaining to do the job on their own, and she had learned that she had only so much time alone before an unanswered telephone would arouse suspicion.  This time she took enough pills to put her to sleep and tied a plastic bag over her head so she would suffocate in her sleep. 

     She did not leave a note, she hadn’t the first time either,but this time she had laid several books on Zen Buddhism on the bed near her, with a few paper markers between the pages.  To justify herself?  To relieve her friends of guilt over her aloneness by implying she had belief of something at the end or that, at least, she was too deluded to have really suffered?  Or, were the passages marked simply better written than she thought herself able to do at the time?  Manny thought a note must be difficult to reconcile with the act. While writing it the usual aggravating voices of vanity and hypocrisy would resume their twaddle, insulting resolve.  Few were left in this culture who might ever be certain of the unanimity of their decisions. 

     These tapes were as close to a voice from the grave as she was going to leave.  He could not follow her last steps, she might have reported them to him after the first time, but typically, those rescued after proving their last full measure of devotion had nothing revelatory to say; perhaps, like those spit back by the sea, their devotion had had the wrong flavor and they were not permitted entrance into the green gardens where mermaids sing.  

     But her physical presence which has materialized on listening to these tapes presses too closely into him to be ceded without a word to the blankness following her last words to him, and he cannot release this presence into vanishing dream stuff without putting some message on the long hour of tape that was never used. "We can talk later.  Better later", and he presses the record button to cover over that chasm:

     "A woman told me this story.  She was woken up by the telephone.  Very late.  After two in the morning.  `Elaine?  It's Terrance.'  Terance had died twenty years ago.  On stage.  He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert.  He had made love with every French professor he had had.  She was one of them.  `Terrance.  It's nice to hear from you.  How are things over there?' she asked.  He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out.  It had snuck up on him.  He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall.  All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes.  He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines.  A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away.  `I'm so happy for you, Terrance.  It sounds beautiful.  Blue skies.  I'm so relieved, I've stopped believing that was possible.  I hardly seem to care much about them here.  I didn't think I'd get that back.  Oh, I hope so, I hope I didn't put if off too long.'  He answered, `You didn't.  We didn't.  The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.'  `What a surprise.  I've grown resigned.  I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway.  So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest.  Grey clouds sounded much more like it.  Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky.  We all miss you.'  `But, that's why I called.  I miss you.  I think it was the sun coming back.  I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were.  For me.  You could be.  You're so generous.  You can't help it.  I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing.  A light on everything, I was thinking, and you came to mind.  You know, the sun was warming my pants, I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up.  What are you wearing?'  `Terrance.  You mustn't think that way.  Not there.  It's too sad.  It's awful.  To still think that way.  They should never have stopped the rain.  I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame.  It must be a dream.  We must be allowed to forget.  I'll pray for you.  I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back.  And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me.  It's so unseemly of me.  You're just a boy.  And I miss you.  So, unfair.  I've got to let you go.  But, it's harder now than it was before.  It's all I have left.  It's got to be a sin to summon the dead.  But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you.  Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now.  You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone.  Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.'

     Well, it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but Terrance on sabbatical in Florence, separated by seven hours and a few months of blessed silence after a year of venomous spiffs.  Terrance with the skinny legs and bad breath.  That Terrance, the one whose co-habitation inside the name of the musician had struck her as grotesque, and who then served as one of those messengers in dreams who always seem to be wearing disguises.  I've told you the story.It did happen, I've added to it, it scared her.  She was brave conversing with the dead when she was still groggy, she just continued the conversation in the spell of dreaming when such things can seem normal.  But she became superstitious when repeating it to me and stopped abruptly, afraid we were being overheard.  I told it to you to remind you how the living always have an ear cocked to the dead.  We shouldn't think it is illicit, or ominous.  Please, it's a thing of sunny days.  You've probably forgotten, but we have always heard your dead voices whispering through the leaves, even in sunlight. 

     Do you have a spare moment?  You know, it is not that far from my office to the East River.  When I get the chance, I walk there.  There's a park around Gracie Mansion.  I walk through it.  I'd like you to come along.  Do you like pigeons?  Everybody is obligated not to.  I've always liked them.  Maybe, you would understand that more.  They live here as if we don't, that might seem prescient to you.  Maybe, you see them more clearly than you see us.  Especially when they fly.  Maybe, you're fooled into thinking they belong with you.  When I was a kid I spent too much time alone.  You are familiar to me.  I think we should be on these terms, I imagine you along with me.  It's quite natural to us.  Your absence, it's familiar to me, from empty mirrors.  I could enter the space where my shadow lived.  And look out.   Did you know, Matsui, that beauty carries that space inside it?  Doesn't that change everything between us?  Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them?  Did you hear them more personally?  Did you?  If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you?  I don't believe you can hear any of this, by now you're dust.  Am I here to say good-bye at last?  But, it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with, that the rest of us learn  we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled  will be eternal.  There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."

     He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.  

     He nodded off.  A minute later he wakes, saying what?  What?  into the dark room.  He cannot remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhowette with outflung arms cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him, and he does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.                  

                    

 

       

                                         

 

     

  

 

                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two Japanese-Americans.  Did they have to have known you at all?  Did they?  As it turned out, two weeks.  Did they know you?  Your friends.  Or not? "

     "They were trying to be helpful."

     "Not glib?"

     "They were trying to be helpful.  He is a lawyer.  Highly successful.  They like him.  It was for him, too.  He was looking for someone too.  Most are already married.  It seemed like good fortune."

     "Little Benny."     

     He can hear her gasp on the tape, he knows she has covered her mouth with her hand, he remembers that, her eyes wide, an actor's gesture of shock, and now comes her laughter, like water falling from pool to pool, or like glass breaking, a quality to it, not the sound, but the purity, the icy reserve, breaking apart, falling to pieces shard by tinkling shard.  The laugh encouraged bravery, it relished mischief.  It was ready to be shocked and delighted in it.  It invited one to take a chance.  It would be rewarded.  He had made her recite the beginnings of her affairs.  They had all begun precipitously.  She was always finally grabbed. 

     He is making her repeat a story in this tape.  He already knows it.  He is leading her towards one part of it.  He anticipates it now.  He did then.

     "You should have known, introducing himself that way.  Bernard might have been different.  Just what you might have needed for rescue.  So, not such good fortune.  Because..."

     "It was unsatisfactory."

     "Yes?"

     "It was not satisfactory."

     "Couldn't you say you were not satisfied?  Yes?  You were not satisfied."

     "I was not satisfied."

     "And why not?"

     "We have discussed this."

     "And you are still saying `it' was unsatisfactory, so I feel as if we haven't talked about it at all.  You knew from the beginning.  It was not a general malaise, didn't you?  Because you went to your apartment.  At that point you were still ready to give it a go, or maybe it was just easier or maybe you might show him a thing or two and your friends, and just maybe, who knows, maybe you'll get a surprise.  So, be complete, let's see what we turn up.  He is in your apartment."

     "He is in my apartment."

     "And?  Are the lights off?  Did you have drinks?  Tell me what you were wearing.  You have to make an effort.  The medications come in conjunction with an effort."

     "I wore a black dress.  We kissed right away.  Why else would I invite him in?  But he goes looking for a closet to hang his coat.  When his arms are caught in the sleeves-he tried shrugging it off both shoulders at once and I know he is too nervous if he is doing that. He is a highly successful lawyer, and the back of the coat is flopped over the two sleeves and he is pinned, he'll have to gyrate, and I kissed him then because I think I lost patience."

     "You were not touched, perhaps, by his nervousness?"

     "He looks stupid.  It's exasperating.  I don't want to see it anymore.  He's a monkey in that coat.  Ben-ny.   Ben-ny.   Why doesn't he know how to take off a coat?   He can't even put his arms around me.  He turned away.  He is embarrassed.  He is always going to be ashamed."

     "And you?"

     "I am not ashamed.  He is silly."

     "And that's when you touched him, wasn't it?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "What's he there for, anyway?"

     "Because nothing else is left.  No other reason by now for him to be there, so let's get it over with, or what?"

     "He's just silly.  Glum as a plum.  All night already I have listened to his serious talk.  Too boring.  I am tired of being humble daughter.  I don't want to hear one more word."

     "This will shut him up."

     "Oh, yes.  He still can't get his arms out of the coat.  I drop his pants down, too.  He has on boxer shorts.  Then I go to the bedroom."

     "You left him there with his pants around his ankles."

     "Let him show courage."

     "Did you think he would follow?"

     "Eventually."

     "You didn't care, already?"

     "I went to the bathroom to prepare."

     "But, you knew there was no point to it already.  You had..."

     "I had courage for us both.  Kicking him out would be rude.  I am a civilized woman.  He should learn to take off his coat and to not talk like a student.  He is a highly successful lawyer."

     "But, when you had him in your hand, you already knew this would not go on long."

     The gasp and laugh again. 

     "You would not have continued, even if you found other reasons.  No other reasons would have been sufficient to overcome that, (he hears himself cough, again, his throat had obviously become dry) aberration."

     "I treated him with courtesy."

     "He never knew.  But, you were firm.  You broke it off."

     Her laugh again. 

     "You had him in your hand.  Why didn't you?  Why did you drag things out?"

     "That would have been bad manners."

     "What did he do when you touched him?"

     "The man always becomes serious then.  He was concentrated."

     "You don't remember anything else, about him?"

     She laughed.

     "He moaned.  Men are very Gothic then."

     "He didn't say anything?  That you remember."

     "For once he did not say anything."

     "They do sometimes, don't they?"

     "Sometimes."

     "The first time?"

     "Sometimes."

     "You can't remember?"

     "I love you.  Gibberish."

     "Never anything you believe."

     "It is not the time to extract promises."

     "You've never known at that moment, this is different?  This one is special?"

     She laughed again.   

     His voice again, taut.  Reacting to her laugh.  She has swung away from what he wanted.  He is leading her back.

     "Maybe, you laugh when you become uncomfortable.  When you begin to see yourself in what you are doing.  That might be the place for our most valuable work.  Let's concentrate at that point.  We should try bringing to consciousness what you bury there.  We left him with his pants tangled around his ankles, a belittling situation for him to find himself in, but he doesn't just find himself there, you've put him there and yet all that has been skipped.  What is your part in this?  You undid his pants, you remember very well the result of what you did, enjoy it, I think, but don't take responsibility for it.  So, try again. "    

     "Try again?'

     "Exactly."

     "Again. Grr.  Too boring."

     "Avoidance.  From when you kissed him."

     "I did not kiss him."

     "He is taking off his coat."

     "I didn't kiss him for that.  He looks too stupid.  He has no manners.  He is unsophisticated."

     He remembers how she would stretch before she was forced into digging into these memories, or before she made them up for him.  She would sit up.  And she would do small calisthenics with her neck and shoulders to loosen them up.  It was a strange body language, ritualistic and probably adopted from her father, who walked about with rocks on his back to strengthen his heart.  She would roll her shoulders, and lean her head back and turn it side to side.  Then she would begin, looking at him at the head of the couch, testing the story, perhaps, before laying back down.  When he remembers the calisthenics, he remembers how incongruously mechanical they were in her body which was so completely female, not zaftig, but a body where the femaleness was spread evenly, where joints were rounded together and her skin, for all its want of bosom and haunch, was suffused with luxuriousness and seamless smoothness.  The arm rowing, the head swaying, she might have been a child imitating a man.  Maybe, a child called on to join an adult activity and following the whole ritual without knowing which parts were critical.

     "You didn't kiss him.  You grabbed him."

     "Ah.  Yes?  I did not grab him.  His stomach is sticking out.  Like a little boy.  I patted his stomach, he's got a little pot belly, I stuck a finger through his shirt, but he has his pants too high, covering his belly button.  He's going to put his coat back on?  Or what is he going to do?  So, I undid his belt.  He's in boxer underwear.  Hopeless."

     "The pants just drop off when you unfasten the belt?  You're running through this again.  Take more time."

     "Uh-huh.  Of course.  Of course, I had to unzip him.  Right?  Uh-huh.  Carefully, I don't want him to get caught.  I hold him inside so he will not get caught.  Push him down.  He is wearing tailored pants, if he goes to the courtroom he must wear these pants.  They have a button inside so the fly goes right down because the pants do not spread.  I have to unbutton that button, also.  Right?  Right.  He's peeking through the fly.  Sure.  I give it a pinch.  In fun.  It's not such a tragedy.  Let's go.  OK?"

     "You've skipped over your disappointment.  We know there was that.  But, then his feelings.  What did you notice?  He didn't say anything?"

     "Too fast.  I have to hold him down so the zipper will not bite him.  He does not want to go down.  I am firm about this for his own good.  I am responsible for his well-being.  I have him completely in my hand, too bad, but he must be nervous, so I squeeze him, maybe that's not just right, I just squeeze the end with two fingers, is that better?, or I can put my thumb below the glans, it's like a little hat, and I can press there, a...a, below the glans, and hold it around, or? Or, just squeeze it a little, just with my fingertips. Until he makes some noises, grumph, grumph, Mr. Attorney, maybe.  Maybe not.  I can hear him breathing.  Like he has been running and wants to keep quiet?"

     "No protest?  Maybe, you didn't notice.  One might expect, his pants at his ankles, some protest.  A word perhaps.  His hands are tied.  And then he's hobbled by the pants, and there is your competency, this is all happening without a hitch, so to speak.  Practiced routine, he's the unrehearsed element, as far as he can see.  He might protest that, being a push over so to speak.  A word.  One would expect it.  If you are truly engaged, you would likely remember him uttering the word.  Maybe, quite personal, or feeling that way, even if the word were not personnel at all. Just a word, but that instant, a plea. For the very reason nothing personnel can work, could possibly be understood, whether it was in his own language or in no language at all, not really able to be put into words, this plea to be taken personnel. And so he only has the one word which has to say all this and can't and really isn't a word at all when he says it, because he doesn't want you to hear it as you always have before, but only as it's coming from him, new, or very old, but out of him only and not some common currency.  If you were to carefully remember that time, if you had been more careful, I think you would remember that word."

     "If I was more careful. He said nothing."

     "Nothing?  Did he?  I don't think so.  It's hard for me to imagine him then believing in that nihilism.  I doubt he could have believed, just then, on his quick demise in your life.  He would be misinterpreting, thinking either he is irresistible, or at least touching in his awkwardness.  Not receiving the implied insult in your shop-lifting of this misplaced article.  I think instead, some totally inappropriate gravity.  Try to remember.  The tone should help you, it would have been as clangorous as the screams of someone deaf.  Think."

     "He didn't say anything."

    "I see, your construction before was artificial.  I missed that.  Theatrical even.  He said nothing.  Well, one of us certainly has been deaf this hour."

     "No. No. No. I have been listening."

     "Yes. Yes you have.  Just then you had it, didn't you?  I heard it.  You heard it at last.  You made it your own.  It was there but you didn't know it until it broke open in you, and then there it is, loud and clear, as if you had your ear to his heart.  "No, no, no".  His protest at being robbed of the chance of bringing to you a unique generosity, maybe we can name it charity, because at this moment of misinterpretation, he feels full enough that what he wishes to give has the size of unity sublime, soul mate, nothing less, and that is charity.  If one wished to carry this on, hearing that "no, no, no" as if he were still speaking it, entering into that suspended minute with him, I think we would see slipping away from him a chance to forgive himself forever the loathing which has kept him separate from his own heart.  Right then, I suspect, your being Japanese was like the closed door of a mirror suddenly opening and falling through into every answer ever asked."

     Silence during which the granulations in the air are recorded along with some relaying through the wooden desk of the sounds that strum through the ground.  Then,

     "I don't let him go.  No, I won't do this.  I hold him, oh, and he says, "no, no, no" but I am holding him, my hand is not so strong but for this I know it will be strong enough to be kind.  Very gentle, I remember, very sweet, it's good, very careful.  No need to worry, it's all right, OK, OK.  Oh. Oh. Oh."        

     Manny cringes when he listens to the tape of this session, shaking his head.  He has always been more interactive with his patients than is traditional in orthodox psychoanalysis, often interspersing sessions of free association on the couch with interpretive dialogues where he and the patient sit facing each other and evaluate the course of the treatment and reach agreements on progress and strategy.  But this herding of Matsui cannot be veiled as collaboration in treatment.  He can only spare himself by believing he had no choice himself, that he was more driven than driving and that the explanations he was brow-beating her with to force her compliance and which are so transparently rationalizations for an obsessive motive at the time were not understood by him.  But then...Certainly she knew.  He hears her designing her monologues to satisfy him, sometimes testing them word by word to see if they fit his obsession, tacking in mid-course to follow his lead.  And then this...tape after tape labeled Matsui which put on the machine turn out to have been erased or recorded over, the unbearable record of erotic pandering expunged.  Sometimes a fragment is left.  He must have erased them in wildly swinging moods, sometimes cold with icy resolve and other times in fits of agony, destroying the voice he regretted losing.  And Matsui, knowing the contract, familiar with it from her experiences with men and her ready objectification in their eyes, her ability to become an ideal form for them, dressing with ever increasing consistency for his pleasure, measuring his response until she knew without his ever having to say it that childish exhibitions of sexuality aroused him, innocently exposed chaste cotton underwear, coltish gestures and huge sighs of theatrical  exasperation, knowing the conditions under which she would continue getting her drugs.  

     Under cover of one tape labeled Matsui, a telephone conversation with Daniel, his son, when he left his wife some years back to become a jazz pianist.  Why recorded on the tape?  To make a record over this unbearable evidence that he had been a responsible father?  Aware of the text it was covering with every word spoken, he hears himself deliberate and concerned, altruistic, offering to pick his son up from the transient hotel he is staying at in Hartford and drive him home to his wife, offering as well to speak to her, smooth the waters, and accepting without protest Daniel's sarcastic provocations and accusations, accepting them with therapeutic or patriarchal patience.  "I thought it was cement glue.  OK, so that's the route-sniff that crap and drop the vocabulary.  I'd learn the blues. But that's semen stuck on the door.  These guys sit on the toilet and jerk off.  That's the blues and I can't do it. I'm calling you collect.  I'm going back to my room to jerk off with the covers up to my neck.  Too much romance.  This is for us dad.  For you.  You'll see, we're gonna hug like men when this is over, without a word, two dumb animals with sad eyes, god damn it.  At last.  Cleaned out"...and then that spastic break when what was recorded over resumes... "Let's see you.  Start again.  Carefully.  In front of the mirror, begin there, see yourself."

     "O-o-oh. Oh.  I do that before I put on the dress. When I get out of the shower.  Before I put on my brassiere, black tonight."

     Her voice: From the start he had noticed a ventriloquistic quality in it.  She was away from the spot where the voice originated, in mood and vantage.  She had beautiful, full lips, and her mechanics of speaking were opulent.  Each syllable was molded through a kiss.  The result was a precision that was also lush, a topiary trimming.  Her voice was slightly mechanical, there even seemed to be rusty places on it, these were where anger abraded it into scratchy hoarseness, but for the most part it had the frictionless, flensed perfection of silver joints.  

   Her voice was hypnotic for him.  He was trained in hypnosis.  The voice is essential to the technique.  It should be seamless, without hesitations, preferably silky or felt-like, a little sing-song.  An incantation.  What the hypnotist creates is a voice without inflection or personality, without the ability to clash and arouse.  Freud said the dream functions to keep the sleeper asleep. That was the voice desired.  Only audible to an inner ear, the sable echo of one's own inner voice. 

     What would sex be like for her?  There would be passion, not emotion or feeling, these would seem mere fretwork compared to the rescue of a soul-a weight that severe and perilous. But, temperance. Not reserve, but an ordained futility.  At the very moment of recovery, of solid arrival: Futility.  An instant fading.  What would he feel through his arms?  A shocking lightness, her arrival when completed already including her withdrawal.  No sooner would she surely be in her lover's arms than he would feel the imported emptiness, the echoless stillness accompanying her return: The substance of her dreamless soul.   Without residue of gratitude or recognition for him.   And in most cases this was all that he would sense.  But for some, some few, given the endless time to see without being scrutinized by her pure blank stare-he might see the greater alienation from experience and affection and warmth and memory and terror, and even see as well her acclimation to those states of non-self from where she had just returned. 

     One lover in ten, perhaps, would know the chill, so immediate to him, was final and infinite.  He would know it for that brief time before he was captured again.  While beholding her in a catastrophe as great as birth or death, only the fatal proximity to such larger event pushing him outside of the act for brief moments to actually behold her apart before her instinctual sexual assaying noted his distance and took him in again, took him absolutely: The inclusion of the male to his very fiber, to his all, and in that all, the blank, frozen awe at futures begun and ended here and now and beyond.  Only briefly might he witness her aloft or buried.  How would this look to him, this fusion of opposites? A trembling quietude he could not interpret?  A humming in her he could feel, shivers and tremors, nearness to a density that might sink him like an anvil, but which embraced her?  No flailing, no writhing, no protest or pain or drama in her, no space left outside the grip on her for these things to occupy.  He could only guess at the distinction between burial and flight as she passed through the absolute deeps...seeing the angelic torpor and disinterest of the creature aloft over the fathomless: Her ecstasy without rapture, that erasure of emptiness inside itself that was her sought for release, this dissolution of soul into its origins and end in vacuum. 

     Before she required him again  ("Several ways to remind the man if his mind is wandering"), and Manny had her enumerate because he required from her grace and mastery, it was around these that his hope centered, in his transparent possession of her sexual genius, her instrumentality, out of which she had already been removed. 

     She deteriorated with the continued use of medications.    She said she was suicidal and the drugs were all that were keeping her alive.  He thought it likely that she threatened suicide to get the drugs.  She had the strategies of an addict.  She began speaking like a junkie, long pauses in which it seemed the machinery of the brain had simply stopped or as if she had forgotten what she was saying or could no longer make sense of language.  She blanked out.  Once, her silences had impressed him; they were evidence of this mastery of hers, her lack of excitement and her assurance, or the absolutism at her center.  Now, stupidities echoed from the dead space, as if he were overhearing the testimonials of ex-alcoholics and addicts from a twelve step program, as if one of those bare rooms with the circle of folding chairs had been implanted in her breast.  She repeated the cant she heard from her friends who by this time, it appeared, had streamlined the chore of talking to her into a corner man's spurring of will. 

     Her descent was a relief to him, at first.  He was sure he had fallen out of love with her.  Because of the drugs it was probably too late for him ever to actually be a good therapist for her, but at least he was no longer acting out of repressed desire. After all, she bored him.  She even disgusted him.  But then, the disgust became exciting.  It made him the slightest bit drunk, gave him a buzz.  Her abused body permitted him a sloppy exuberance.  He need not be so careful.  His feelings were not tangled any more.  Her beauty had made him delicate or deferential or petulant, at times.  Now, he was aroused and fascinated by the dandruff and psoriasis she developed, by the intimacy seeing them gave to him.  Dry white spittle lodged at the corners of her mouth.

     He sat beside her on the couch, she had begun surrendering to slovenly sobs, two ribbons of glistening mucous ran from her nose.  He put an arm around her and comforted her.  Her sobs were a chugging labor.  He stroked her hair.  It was coarser than he expected.  She seemed pregnant, as abducted by the mundane as a pregnant woman, and like a pregnant woman afflicted and somehow disposed of and despised, trapped in a form which seemed punished and benighted.  She was not pregnant, he did not feel towards her what he felt for a pregnant woman, but there were more than inklings of it.  He looked at her larded thighs, naked because her tights no longer fit.  They would slog and trudge.  He had the lover's feeling of being dragged along into earthy tasks, of getting hitched to the plow.  He reveled in this loss of aesthetics.  His ethical sense, even his moral sense, lapsed in this squalor.  He had never liked the denning part of marriage with Florence, the plowed earth musk of dirty diapers and the filling of the apartment with female flesh, its emissions and diurnal rhythms.  But, now he could enjoy a domestic seediness.  He patted her thigh, its nakedness was no longer luminous.  She was part of the soiled world.  He squeezed her flaccid arm, her head lolled onto his shoulder.

     "Take some simple steps.  It wouldn't hurt to spend a day cleaning your apartment.  And doing a wash.  Odors cling to clothes."

     "I can't wear any of my clothes anymore.  Just these."  

     She stuck out her tongue, a white film adhered to it. 

     "Hygiene is important.  There's no exemption.  It's unfortunate, being ill should be enough, but the clock is still ticking.  At middle age the body's chemistry begins to change.  It's noticeable.  For poets, artists, martyrs, unless they're saints."

     Her eyes sometimes rolled back in her head like a doll's.  Their heaviness had seemed part of the erotic anomie he imagined for her, weighted by witness and verdict.  By the end, they seemed dumb as oxen's.  He sat next to her on the couch at the end of the session, not every session, just a few, enough to make it seem normal to him, until it did, and he could do it without stage fright, plop down next to her like she was a passenger on a bus, with as little regard, holding her prescription in one hand.  Times for refills were the opportunities he picked to sit beside her, holding the paper out of her reach, not deliberately, but as if it was demeaning for him to deal with, until she had to ask for it, which she could not do right away, not until he had perhaps stroked her hair, lifting it at last off the nape and brushing the chaste saddle of skin that stretched across the string of vertebrae, and then she would remind him, and he would look startled, as if she had said something impolite, as if the whole topic was, or she had not been listening, as if the paper in his hand was un-pocketed change she was asking for. 

     Later, over the years since her suicide, he realizes something else had evolved in him during her rapid decline.  Rather than falling out of love with her a physical commiseration had grown in him.  He did not recognize it at the time, it seemed to him that all he did was abuse her abandoned body, but later, listening to the tapes, he found that the opportunities he had taken to touch her, to sit close enough to her to insure that her opiated body would lean heavily against him, now made him physically miss her, to miss that real weight, even the remembered stale and chemical odors that hung about her.  Her drugged state had allowed him to gain an intimacy with her, and losing that intimacy turned out to be the greatest part of his grief, while the loss of her beauty and with it his cursed intoxication with her has faded in importance.  At the time her beauty had seemed an emblem of a governing order to the world based on cruelty and power, and when it paled it seemed a vindication of this principal's ruthless precedence over life, and now he cannot make that seem significant compared to her single death. 

     She had reported an early attempt at suicide.  It was too stylized to have been sincere; she had been at an age of artistic excess, twenty years ago, her expectations were lyrical, a state of temper he did not see her as capable of anymore.  Besides, she had only gone through the preparations: Ran the bath water, laid the safety razor on the edge, climbed into the tub, and toyed with the hallucinogenic changes her resolution had brought to everything she saw or thought.  Finally, her boyfriend at the time barged in to use the toilet and broke the spell.  She had to tell him what had been going on or he would never have noticed, and it was immediately impossible for her to recapture the insouciant nostalgia she had been feeling toward life, which could have been proof of her actual nearness to the act.  All she had left was a simple arithmetic to measure her proximity, the half hour or so the clock had parsed off before her boyfriend's entrance.  Had her will already been weakening, was that already too long a hesitation?  Or too short a period to balance against other gaps of boredom and passive aggression that were part of a normal day?   

     She reported to Manny that during the week since her last appointment she had spent a night sharpening a knife.  Her somewhat boyfriend was visiting. Manny had heard of him before.  They had not been able to decide on a title for him.  They never had sex, the medicines had effectively spaded her, but he was available for moral support at any time.  He was relieved, Manny thought by the lessor culpability which came with no longer being her lover.  It seemed to Manny that his main goal at this time was to slip away on tip-toe with her still balanced upright, at least until he left the room.  He thought, too, that she used him for a straw dog for Manny and their therapeutic relationship.     

     "He doesn't want sex either.  He is much happier now that I'm a fat girl so he has a reason.  He's feeling much better.  He was a problematic performer, but so elegant and attentive when apologizing that I can't lose him.  He does errands.  He wants to act like we're married and don't have to fuck anymore, thank god.  He likes me better fat and ugly because he is so loyal now.  We're so boring.  We don't say anything anymore.  Since we don't sleep together he can be smug.  I don't dress for him.  I'm so fat now, and I see it excites him.  It was too competitive for him before, now he is doing me a big favor.  He wants to do favors and be superior.  He wants to please, maybe he needs a mommy.  We're married all right.  We're so boring together.  He's so pontifical.  He talks on and on.  What is he saying?  He wants to touch me now.  He's always patting me like a buddy, every chance he gets.  Yack.  Yack.  Yack.  I'll be all right, he's saying.  I've got to be strong.  Don't give up.  What did he tell me once?  I have too many secrets because my parents were in an internment camp.  I'm trying too hard to not be Japanese.  I'm ashamed. Like all survivors.  I should be Japanese.  What's he mean?  He wants to touch me now that it would be such a favor and he would be my savior.  He's getting horny.  In our trashy life he can be horny.  He feels like a prince down there.  Japanese.  I've had Jewish boy friends.  They all want me to be the first Jew.  They always think everybody else is in the Golden Age while they're too smart to get in.  He thinks he looks Eurasian.  From the Middle East, but the Japanese are more perfect.  I showed him Japanese, all night I sharpened the knife and he comes in and out of the kitchen sputtering and can't leave because he doesn't know who the knife is for.  He should see himself then.  He's got no place with his Japanese Medea, ah, ah, ah, ah, flapping his arms, caw, caw, caw."

     Listening to this uncommon harangue by her, usually she sat stonily or sniveled, Manny thought the contemplation of suicide had had its usual tonic effect, clearing the mind and restoring pride of purpose, and thought it had already served and was not really a threat anymore, and that furthermore it had allowed her to take a shot at him; since he had not prevented her from swerving so close to the edge she had in effect out-argued or out-smarted and eluded him.   

     And then, on his watch, she tried again, and it was only the intervention of her friends that saved her.  They grew uneasy whenever she lingered in a bathroom in a restaurant.  She was so fixated on suicide, talking of nothing else, that she had lost a woman's privilege to dawdle over her toilette while the rest of the table hangs fire, and when she failed to answer her telephone on a morning when she should have been awake for work-she was maniacal about schedules, she seemed to have lost any memory of their context or reason, but depended on rolling along in their ruts-they roused the super to open her door with a key.      

     She was laying on the bed, dressed for a chilly evening's stroll in pants and cashmere sweater, whether out of modesty or a consideration for death's chill approach they wondered, and felt guilty for wondering since it seemed the wrong thing to be thinking standing over her body.  And more bitchily still, noticing that she had on her black boots, which tipped the balance to image and vanity.

     Her friends on guard that day were a couple.  The vigil rotated, friends spelling friends.  Manny got the report from the husband who had met Matsui through his wife.  He was handling her temporal affairs one of which was informing the shrink, while his wife visited Matsui at the clinic where a man would be a sullen encumbrance.  The consensus was that Manny was to blame and this fellow plowed into Manny over the phone with the gusto which comes with relief.  He had been chaffing under the rule of righteously sad women finally completely in their element. 

     Manny waited out his initial exuberance, and bogged him down in documenting what might be called medical details or psychological clues, all of them useless and tedious, but not incidentally forcing the guy to confess his morbid curiosity and a spiking of arousal the body in its state of sedated debauchery had caused him.  And confess, too, the frenzied gossip they were all enjoying in the aftermath of the attempt. Its religious timbre and invigorated purpose.  And a sense all of them had gained of being rare and imperiled and wiser.         

     She had left neat and resolved, with her house dusted and polished, dishes washed and stacked in their cabinets, clothes folded in their drawers, in that state of mature detachment a suicide often gains at the end, and she was dragged back as a frazzled ruin and thrown in with other wrecks to endure a two week remedial course in how to live normally. 

     Manny did not visit her at the clinic.  She was under the care of the house rehabilitation experts.  The details of the perverse turn his therapy had taken would not be revealed or believed.  The testimony of suicides is disregarded: Their interpretations have failed the most basic test of keeping them alive.  A tacit superiority is felt towards them.  Insincerity and manipulation is assumed.  The treatments pointedly ignore or drown out in tuneless rhetoric any suggestion that the suicide may have opposed the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, that he might have shown gallantry and sober courage or conclusive judgement or had turned a cold eye on life and death.  They were treated as victims of their emotions with crippled intelligence.  In this institution of sandbox group therapy, her lost sessions with Manny had the aspect of romance, and she phoned out to him when she could and attacked and plead like an ex-lover. 

     Wasn't he going to call her?  He wasn't going to just abandon her, was he?  How could he?  He couldn't just run away.  Look what he had done.  He couldn't just pretend he didn't know.  Why didn't he call?  Didn't he have a medical responsibility?  Did she embarrass him now?  And then: She was losing weight. 

     He could hear the television in the background.  The telephone was in the common room.  She had a sneering mockery in her voice then, she asked him what color nightgowns he preferred.  Someone else was waiting to use the phone, perhaps to call their own shrink, he could sense she was talking for the other person to hear as well.  She had brought her black one.  Was that OK? 

     He shouldn't blame himself.  Is that what kept him from calling?  And if he was blaming himself, was this handling it?  This was hardly the time.  She was the issue.  She was in no shape to take care of him.  Did he have to hear he was not to blame?  Would that make a difference?  Well then, he was not to blame.  Did he feel better, could she talk now?  Would he listen?  Or would he now stop even taking her calls?   Now that he was off the hook?  He could go back to his world.  A thousand pardons.  Forgive the intrusion.  Psychiatrists do quite well.  Their patients are a necessary inconvenience, otherwise what a wonderful world they live in.  Did he own any impressionists?  She preferred Cezanne.  The others were frivolous compared.  Did he have a summer place, in Buck's county maybe?  She bet he was a good driver.  She concurred with his selection of a BMW, no, she really wouldn't hear an alternative.  She simply wouldn't, she would put her hands over her ears before she would listen to such talk.  Did he think they should re-institute the scarlet letter?  These incarcerations flew by so fast, and then none the wiser.  All that wasted effort.  She would not be watching soap operas upon her dismissal and she doubted very much that her new friends would last.  The food was awful, the decor non-existent.  She might escape improvement altogether, unless she were reminded by a branding of some sort.  Otherwise she might be quite inconspicuous.  But, really, they were taught to be, but it was such a dilemma, suppressing pride but not leaving one so anonymous that one forgot one's responsibility and the privilege of being alive, about which one was already so nonchalant.

     She called him out of the habit of life. She just wanted to make it through these two weeks and be released, but she could not remain aloof.  She fell victim to the habits and reflexes of this redundant life.

     She knew what she was considered by looking at those stored in this place with her.  She did not have enough endurance to do anything but resist the immediate implications.  She was not planning on a future, she did not believe in a substance inside of this farce, a reason to endure the sham because of a promise of joy or love or cure.  The dimensions were fixed.  Her voice was cold with rage.  She was locked in with boring and ugly company as a punishment for failure.  He thought she was angry too because she had not been angry when she ended her life before, and she thought she was succumbing to debasement and her present anger, a low level of consciousness, was the proof.  She would be stuck in the coils of insult and retribution, constantly balancing the books, never clear of debt and finished with it as she had been before. 

     He did not know she was going to kill herself within three weeks.  She may have thought from the beginning that she had simply been interrupted and must wait this out, or she may have conceived it again as the only escape, the only privacy she had left, the only secret that held interest for her.  Maybe.  He believed, though, that it was not on her mind then, that the situation was too endlessly petty to earn escape, and suicide as it had been transcribed into pidgin in the group sessions was too enfeebled to survive outside the walls of this institution.   Suicide was able to be measured here, and it was smaller than the tedium and vandalizing boredom.  Suicide would not exceed the reach of deadened lives; it could not reach death, not anymore, and what death it might succeed in, had been polluted unto dismal. 

     She was on the public phone.  She did not whisper, everything she said was part of the continuum of the place.  The clinic had no limits; she expected him to already be privy to the narrative, plunged in it as they all were.  As soon as he picked up the phone he heard, "She's coming back right now.  She'll come right over here.  She's going to want to know your name.  I'm not going to tell her.  SSh.  Don't say anything.  She never combs her hair.  Deliberately, she doesn't want to get thrown out of here.  Here she is."   A commotion on the other side.  "None of your beeswax.  She's going to take the phone.  Don't breathe a word."

     A woman's beefy, threatening voice, full of phlegm but still brittle:  "You're not doing her any good.  You didn't, you know.  And now you're not giving her a chance to get better.  Maybe, you're afraid she will, then where would you be?  You should have some conscience, give her a chance.  She's supposed to concentrate on her work here and all you're doing is letting her continue with her lies.  It didn't work.  Won't you be satisfied till she's dead?  This is serious you know.  She tried to kill herself, she'd be dead if it was just for you.  Who do you think you are, risking her like this?  You just really don't give a shit, do you?  Me. Me. Me.  She's in trouble.  She looks like shit.  You wrung your little sweetheart almost clean out.  She's a fat faced mama san, don't you think maybe you've done enough already?  I'm sure she was just a pretty little wisp of a girl once upon a time, but she's a washed out dishrag now, and she better start facing it or she's never going to be anybody's heart throb again, least of all you, you self-righteous jerk.  Go ahead, it's your funeral."  

     Then Matsui's voice again:  "She's going over to sit on the chair and stare at me until I hang up the phone.  Then she'll follow me around.  She's in my group.  She's decided she can save my life.  She says I'm not facing who I am and if I don't I'll just kill myself again.  She's in and out of here all the time.  She's a funny color from the meds.  I can't get away, she thinks we're sisters. There's no privacy here.  I've got the wrong nightgown, too revealing.  If I called my super, do you think he could bring me my old Mother Hubbard flannel one.  He'd have no trouble finding it in my drawer, everything else is satin and silk".

     And then again,

     "It's TV time now.  Everybody is sitting around watching TV.  I never realized what shows they have on in the day.  There's one where people talk truth to the people who have hurt them in life, and then they hit them.  That's very popular here.  We're not well, so we're not allowed to hit one another, but we're anxious to get out where we can participate.  Day time TV is very generous to the ugly, I don't remember seeing them at night, anyway, not in serious roles.  We're all very grateful.  Someone said he thinks the worm is turning and the dogs will soon have their day.  Another thing to look forward to.  Uh-oh, she was not so absorbed as I thought.  I know she'll want to say a few words to you, just look at it as local color.  A weird yellowish-grey, puce I think.  Oh, everybody's wearing it."

     Again, the morning voice of the woman in her group, this time sinisterly sweet.

     "Is it you again, you patient ear.  She has a special place in her heart for you and we've all got to treat you better because she's so dear to us.  She keeps trying to withdraw from us, that's really the problem, and we love her so much.  The right word from you might help.  I've told her we're her family now, but she rejects us.  She thinks you're going to take her back.  She does.  I don't even think she remembers what that was.  But, a word from you now could save her so much pain later on.  Just tell her that suicidal Orientals are not your cup of tea.  Tell her how you always wanted a silky little lotus blossom sitting on your lap, and it just won't work with a bone crushing fat ass.  That would be so kind of you.  You know how you are, boychick, when you've run out of patience.  Remind her what it'll be when you're tired of being good."                                    She had called him at his office and at home.  Patients had this number for emergencies.  He had an answering machine.  When he heard her voice he would pick up the receiver.  He had recorded some of these calls.  She had killed herself a week after the last one.  He had called her when she was released from the clinic.  She had been home for a day. 

     "It's Doctor Mahler.  How are you?"

     "What?  I don't feel like talking.  I have to clean up.  I'm still cleaning up.  I don't feel like talking.  I have to do a lot of cleaning.  I don't want to talk here.  I don't want to talk to you here.  I have to clean this place up."

     "Of course.  We can talk later.  If you should feel like it.  I hope you're feeling better."

     "We can talk later.  Better later."

     They never spoke again. 

     She was more efficient this time.  She probably did not have enough pills remaining to do the job on their own, and she had learned that she had only so much time alone before an unanswered telephone would arouse suspicion.  This time she took enough pills to put her to sleep and tied a plastic bag over her head so she would suffocate in her sleep. 

     She did not leave a note, she hadn’t the first time either,but this time she had laid several books on Zen Buddhism on the bed near her, with a few paper markers between the pages.  To justify herself?  To relieve her friends of guilt over her aloneness by implying she had belief of something at the end or that, at least, she was too deluded to have really suffered?  Or, were the passages marked simply better written than she thought herself able to do at the time?  Manny thought a note must be difficult to reconcile with the act. While writing it the usual aggravating voices of vanity and hypocrisy would resume their twaddle, insulting resolve.  Few were left in this culture who might ever be certain of the unanimity of their decisions. 

     These tapes were as close to a voice from the grave as she was going to leave.  He could not follow her last steps, she might have reported them to him after the first time, but typically, those rescued after proving their last full measure of devotion had nothing revelatory to say; perhaps, like those spit back by the sea, their devotion had had the wrong flavor and they were not permitted entrance into the green gardens where mermaids sing.  

     But her physical presence which has materialized on listening to these tapes presses too closely into him to be ceded without a word to the blankness following her last words to him, and he cannot release this presence into vanishing dream stuff without putting some message on the long hour of tape that was never used. "We can talk later.  Better later", and he presses the record button to cover over that chasm:

     "A woman told me this story.  She was woken up by the telephone.  Very late.  After two in the morning.  `Elaine?  It's Terrance.'  Terance had died twenty years ago.  On stage.  He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert.  He had made love with every French professor he had had.  She was one of them.  `Terrance.  It's nice to hear from you.  How are things over there?' she asked.  He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out.  It had snuck up on him.  He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall.  All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes.  He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines.  A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away.  `I'm so happy for you, Terrance.  It sounds beautiful.  Blue skies.  I'm so relieved, I've stopped believing that was possible.  I hardly seem to care much about them here.  I didn't think I'd get that back.  Oh, I hope so, I hope I didn't put if off too long.'  He answered, `You didn't.  We didn't.  The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.'  `What a surprise.  I've grown resigned.  I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway.  So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest.  Grey clouds sounded much more like it.  Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky.  We all miss you.'  `But, that's why I called.  I miss you.  I think it was the sun coming back.  I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were.  For me.  You could be.  You're so generous.  You can't help it.  I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing.  A light on everything, I was thinking, and you came to mind.  You know, the sun was warming my pants, I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up.  What are you wearing?'  `Terrance.  You mustn't think that way.  Not there.  It's too sad.  It's awful.  To still think that way.  They should never have stopped the rain.  I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame.  It must be a dream.  We must be allowed to forget.  I'll pray for you.  I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back.  And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me.  It's so unseemly of me.  You're just a boy.  And I miss you.  So, unfair.  I've got to let you go.  But, it's harder now than it was before.  It's all I have left.  It's got to be a sin to summon the dead.  But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you.  Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now.  You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone.  Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.'

     Well, it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but Terrance on sabbatical in Florence, separated by seven hours and a few months of blessed silence after a year of venomous spiffs.  Terrance with the skinny legs and bad breath.  That Terrance, the one whose co-habitation inside the name of the musician had struck her as grotesque, and who then served as one of those messengers in dreams who always seem to be wearing disguises.  I've told you the story.It did happen, I've added to it, it scared her.  She was brave conversing with the dead when she was still groggy, she just continued the conversation in the spell of dreaming when such things can seem normal.  But she became superstitious when repeating it to me and stopped abruptly, afraid we were being overheard.  I told it to you to remind you how the living always have an ear cocked to the dead.  We shouldn't think it is illicit, or ominous.  Please, it's a thing of sunny days.  You've probably forgotten, but we have always heard your dead voices whispering through the leaves, even in sunlight. 

     Do you have a spare moment?  You know, it is not that far from my office to the East River.  When I get the chance, I walk there.  There's a park around Gracie Mansion.  I walk through it.  I'd like you to come along.  Do you like pigeons?  Everybody is obligated not to.  I've always liked them.  Maybe, you would understand that more.  They live here as if we don't, that might seem prescient to you.  Maybe, you see them more clearly than you see us.  Especially when they fly.  Maybe, you're fooled into thinking they belong with you.  When I was a kid I spent too much time alone.  You are familiar to me.  I think we should be on these terms, I imagine you along with me.  It's quite natural to us.  Your absence, it's familiar to me, from empty mirrors.  I could enter the space where my shadow lived.  And look out.   Did you know, Matsui, that beauty carries that space inside it?  Doesn't that change everything between us?  Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them?  Did you hear them more personally?  Did you?  If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you?  I don't believe you can hear any of this, by now you're dust.  Am I here to say good-bye at last?  But, it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with, that the rest of us learn  we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled  will be eternal.  There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."

     He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.  

     He nodded off.  A minute later he wakes, saying what?  What?  into the dark room.  He cannot remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhowette with outflung arms cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him, and he does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.                  

                    

 

       

                                         

 

     

  

 

                             MY FAIR LADY

 

     For years, Manny had spent the hours before bed in his study, but since his blood tests began to show more discouraging numbers he often turns off the desk lamp and sits in the shadows, listening.  He indulges his melancholy.  He may nod off to sleep and wake a little later into a complete amnesia that paroles him from his sentence for a second or two.  The room is dark and stuffy and smells of pipe smoke, and while he has a woozy feeling of panic, his fear is naive and blessed: It is almost wonder, almost awe. 

     Sometimes he has caught a little dream, and in the nature of dreams culled from naps, it was clear and rational. The voice narrating behind these dreams is not recognizable as his own.  Calm, reassuring, it is the omniscient voice speaking over documentary films.  The moral codas do not make the passage to waking, they unravel and when last heard, sound nonsensical, but they had been convincing when the ear was properly tilted, and they hold out the hope that answers lie somewhere along with what is lost, not with what never was. 

     Darkness and a suffusion of wane light.  Then the flood of returning text, too rapidly, but still, for a moment, a chance to switch stories, and the voice in the background, fading but somehow thus diluted everywhere, is overheard reciting other tales, leading him down the forks in time he had passed by.  He has glimpsed the genie of his childhood face in the samovar again, and could believe nothing had happened.

     Until mid-night and even later, he is in his study reviewing his cases and those he is overseeing for psychiatrists in training in his role as the head of the department at the University Hospital.  He also vets articles submitted to him by other members of the Psychoanalytic Association of which he is president.   He is not the editor of the Association's monthly journal, but younger psychiatrists know enough politics to seek his endorsement, and older members who are in cliques loyal to him pass their articles by him as an act of solidarity. 

     Manny does not line edit; he leaves that to the proof readers at the Journal.  He is alert to approach.  He is a consultant.  The Association boils with factions, keeping his mount as president can be a real circus act.  He is ambidextrous with coercion and flattery, but it is the poaching of competing psychoanalytic associations that most exercise his talents.  All of these bodies feel the pinch of alternative therapies and corporatization of services, and fight among themselves for the shards of prestige and the few coins remaining to the legitimate heirs of Freud.  To guard their mandates, they all must plug leaks in orthodoxy.  Manny maintains the watch. 

     The fragmented associations all have the same memory of an empire only recently lost.  The titans of verdict and penance still cast shadows, a few of them are still alive, monuments with white beards and donnish mien.  Manny himself arrived just as the structure was crumbling, he walked grand rounds with some fearsome masters their heavy brogans crunching on fallen plaster. Some of his style was gleaned from these patriarchs.  He is in danger or hope of becoming such a relic to new generations: His amiable fastidiousness which is the watered down form of his mentor's volcanic testiness has become a template for others:  There is a school of young shrinks whose supple intransigence can be recognized as his. 

     After mid-night.  The president of the Manhattan Psychological Association puts aside the company work.  These last few months he can barely fake interest in it.  He  has to check himself from doodling on it, sometimes he has, unconsciously, little boxes with their corners connected to look three dimensional, like aquariums.  Then he has to report the house cleaner has hidden them, and request a new copy be faxed to him.  Sometimes swirls have appeared on the margins, little tornadoes or whirlpools that sometimes have been drawn over time and again until they are a nearly solid black, and are engraved into the sheet and intaglio the ones below.  Such an intensity of despair and anxiety has possessed him while he sat blankly staring.  He can remember none of the possession that drove the pen to carve a storm on the page.  

     The legal pad he uses to jot notes which he will later assemble into commentary, fills up with snippets of writing he cannot relate to the paper he was reading.  "Big gidella."  "Said a mouthful there."  "Crack your cheeks, windbag."  "Get goosed, tight ass." (Manny's father had never tired of that word "goose" and its declensions, "to goose", "silly goose".  He would call his mother a silly goose, a mild phrase it seemed, and she would be stifled with rage.  Her lip would curl back from her teeth and a look of snobbish contempt would freeze on her face).       

     The snippets are cryptic. 

     "Had we but world and time." 

     "Where the ladies wear no pants and the dance they do".       Ladies? Ladies, indeed.  They should be so lucky to insist on that there.

     Commentary on his commentary.  Talmud.  Next line.

     "I see London, I see France, I see, ____'s underpants" 

Obviously inspired, on a roll.  Decent of him to leave it blank.  Or, too dicey to add a name, present candidates out of the question, leaving, indecently, some tender schoolmate, who’s recalling would be outrages here, summoned back by this incantation. 

     So many things waiting for the open sesame of London and France, just waiting to spill out.  Promises then, those code words, for some.  Promises still for some, even for him now, of the past.  Perverse.  That he might be able to conjure, and maybe had while reading the great document in front of him, snow white underwear.  He who at that distant time had always turned away, for the day only it now seemed, storing it to be replayed with its tang never emptied, more poignant for its tardiness, sweeter for the evaporation of panicky awe. Awe now mourned, sweetness notwithstanding, as a spell broken that once was promising premonition and now was mystery lost.

     "The hoochy coochy-coo"

     Divine dance.  Obviously.  Not really for mortals or grownups either, it turned out.  Not as imagined wiggling through all those syllables.  True numerology, one of the names of god before it was forgotten, the natural flow of goos and burbling into form, when burbling was fresh, before language dried, when anything might be said and for the first time ever, invented just for the taste on your tongue.

     "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesy"

     Not going to let it get away from you, I see.  Awake in the dream, though I can't remember it.  That's posies, I think, or I guess I refuse to think.  Putting the lid on hoochy coochy-coo, and maybe in the nick of time, if this is where it was leading then by all means, some poesy to soften the blow of "ashes, ashes, all fall down"  Indeed we do, and in such drift, awful peace, all the fires out, and then, gentle as snowflakes it comes, passion past, drifting down, as gentle as snowflakes, really the hooochy coochy-coo has spared no one this for very long, and poesy delays it only an hour and at the cost of losing all coo-coo syllables where it seemed we might last forever, without beginning or end in sense or sensing, ashes covering the world, so silently as to be hardly noticed, the darkness drifts down.      

     He is nodding off.  Jerks his head up, nods again.  Like a bird dipping at a puddle.  His children and he were wading in ankle-deep shallows.  The children were young again and smooth limbed.  Their calves were like champagne flutes, and all of their ankles were dipped in gold. The shallows, it was noted with disinterested kindness, often have a golden cast and you will notice how they burnish the limbs of those who piddle in them, and the oars of those who paddle in them, either/ors do well here, and the water was a coppery-honey color darkening to amber, in which their limbs attained that perfected nostalgia of sunken objects, while ribbons and curtains of submerged light undulated.  And off shore the peal of combers, back-hoeing silence onto them, vaults of Stygian darkness booming open, and Manny jerked up straight in his chair, his hand still holding the pen on the yellow legal pad.

     Limbs swaddled in a luxurious fatigue, he makes a note to himself on the pad:

     Nursery rhyme scat, sirens to nightmare.  Lash yourself to the mast. 

    

     Twice in the last few months he has gone for manicures.  By these escalated standards he was probably due for another one. The finished perfection did not last long.  Of course he never had to go again, and never had needed to go in the first place, but having once crossed the line, what was once excess became neglect.  By seventy the nails have grown horny and have ridges and dents, which should set a limit on the improvement a manicure can promise, but in fact, it was against such adversity that the art really shone.  Although young women filled the majority of the chairs at the shop he had been to, it was the older ones who luxuriated in the attention and pampering, swooning under it or enthroned like dowagers in their sense of righteous recompense, while the younger ones were in a hurry to be finished and back to battle, keeping abreast on cell phones. 

     He was sure it would be different in another neighborhood. The black and Latina cashiers at any shop in the city laced his palm with silver falling from Mandarin talons in livid hues sporting inlaid rhinestones or palm trees at sunset, and the manicure shops they frequented must over flow with laughter and screeching.  An Elizabethan tavern, he thought.  The shop he chose was close to the university but a few blocks beyond the actual student quarter of coffee and donut shops and pizza and hamburger joints and bookstores. 

     One of the few advantages given to old age is that extravagance inspires applause, even if patronizing.  Self-indulgence becomes cute again, as it was in childhood, and probably for the same reasons: The quixotic futility of it.  The old crones dignified him with churlish suspicion, but mainly, his entrance into the seraglio was greeted with curiosity and encouragement.  The second time there were four young women getting pedicures, which meant they were enthroned on high chairs with foot rests, as men used to be when getting their shoes polished, but of course they were bare-footed, and their skirts were pulled over their knees.  Completely decadent, dedicated to sensuality.  But, not in New York.  All four of them had sullen and impatient expressions on their faces.  They were not hedonists.  Few are actually destroyed by sex in this city, certainly none of these four would be carried away like that.    These wee materialists, not sensualists, the body was a means, not an end in itself. 

     Manny was pleased by his incongruity, and thought that the best explanation for his presence, which he felt he probably projected, was an old world courtliness.  The customers might be dubious, but the Asian manicurists, immigrants all, gave no sign of such savvy.

     Partially in reaction to the tweedy and even sometimes academic seediness of many shrinks, and partially from meticulousness-the bookkeeper's compulsive nit picking that often accompanies shyness-Manny had always dressed well and taken care of his person.  He shaved in a scrutinizing trance.  He had a light beard but shaved his smooth cheeks every morning, and each time he applied the foam, which he did with one of those stout handled brushes with hysterical hair that resemble Hopi dolls, he scanned his whip cream face for its resemblance to the young Freud.  It was one of those tics you cannot shake because it has lodged in an automatic action. When he had become resigned to never being able to raise a beard, he had let the resemblance to Freud with its promise of inheriting the gift, pool solely in his eyes which gained in luminosity with the addition of foam masking. And luminosity and generous grief were qualities he saw in Freud's eyes behind those small, owlish lenses: The tell-tale androgyny and erotic smolder of artistic omniscience.  Afterwards he would caress his polished cheeks with his fingertips.  His emotions in those moments were intense and dreamy.  Romantic.  

     During the last few months an elastic space had opened between him and his body.  Sometimes he felt more detached from it than he ever had before.  Sometimes this came with feelings of compassion or generous humor, while at others it was accompanied with anger and disgust.  Even when the distance disappeared and he was flung into his body with coital intimacy, he never felt dissolved in it; it was like being forced into close companionship with someone on a bus.  Since his diagnosis and more since the worsening of his numbers, since all those times he had surrendered his body into other hands for tests, giving up his modesty, he had carried away with him feelings for it that were the same he might have felt had it been raped.  The same feelings of recrimination, guilt, and loathing.  And in service to these queasy emotions he had begun to pamper his body more.  

     He had bought some new furnishings; a white silk muffler perhaps the most striking.  At the store, he had placed it around his neck sarcastically, as if white were something a pregnant bride should not wear, but he bought it anyway, maybe they might dandle with chastity. Or that for lack of such consideration it was failing him, pouting and throwing a cheap tantrum until he would shower it with extravagances.

     He bought ostrich skin gloves.  He was not sure where they rated in the castes of materials for making gloves, but he picked them for their blond color, and when he bought Italian shoes in a similar blond hue he had never noticed before in shoes, he realized he was buying these things for the lumens they added to his darkening body, and perhaps too, buying them because this body of his, brought low, revealed itself to him in its true aspect, tawdry, and that such glowing things would appeal to its taste for glamour.  From there it was only a step to a manicure which would brighten his fingertips, and in its small way, keep this body dressed even when he had removed his clothes, at least slightly covering some part of the mutilation he saw when he was naked.

     He consented to his first manicure at his barber shop.  He had been going to the same one for twenty years.  Compared to the barber shops he had known growing up, places of terse, nearly punitive grooming, this shop was an apostasy, but over the years it had failed to follow the times into abuse and piercing, remaining true to its initial conception of liberation without disfigurement, and now seemed stodgy, as did its customers.

     The in-house manicurist was a plump Puerto Rican woman or perhaps a series of plump Puerto Rican women, all with storm-tossed hair and tired eyes. Mostly she loitered around the shop, sweeping up the rats' nests of hair on the floor, a task she did with that air of desultory diligence special to menial help.  When he decided on a shave, also for the first time, the barber sensing weakness, suggested a manicure. 

     He found the yurt of towels claustrophobic, the straight razor sinister, and in spite of the slavish attention lavished on nostril hairs and the spectral fuzz on the far reaches of his cheeks, decided once would be enough.  However, the manicure won him over from the moment she took his hand and began to massage it.  The comfort and abject adoration.  By the time the towels were unwound she had moved on to cutting his nails.  She used a dainty scissors and held each finger in turn and it made his hand feel monumental, like an extremity on a statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel as she travelled around its topography.  He caught steeply angled, necessarily sly glances of her past the barber shaving him. She had wheeled over a tray table and sat on a stool absorbed in the rite.  She filed his nails and did a mild curettage on his cuticles.  He only balked at the application of a clear lacquer.       

     Two weeks later he went to the Koreans.  This time the clear lacquer was applied without protest.  He was carried along on the Eastern sensual drift.  His manicurist would catch his eye when she separated one finger off from the others conveying with a pout that it was large and obstreperous, and she had a way of sliding her eyes out from beneath his gaze both chastised and suggestive at the same time.  How many old men eloped into manicure parlors to relish this Asian deference to the male, amenable to being buttered up for a tip? 

     He liked their fractured, mewling English.  They had luxurious glossy skin.  Their hair was, well, their crowning glory, and he was fascinated by its contrast to their skin.  That to him was a mystery, this allele linking jet black to pale white.  It seemed to be a sexual marking, and the paradoxical stuff of fetish.

     Sometimes one of them would laugh.  There were idle moments, empty chairs leaving a chance to gossip.  Their laughs sounded like chimes cascading down a scale.  All of their laughs.  He would start when he heard it.  It was cultural ventriloquism, a libertine note singing through.

     After mid-night.  The study with its closed windows and drapes is always quiet, but a sixth sense registers the hush which descends on the whole city.  His times alone in this study and in offices and rooms throughout his life telescope together.  This is his natural state, the rest has been interruption. It was not the rooms, it was what they held, the nothing that had pushed into them.  He had stumbled into these hermetic pockets in stairwells, in the fissures between jammed together buildings, in corners, beneath beds. Spaces, where the air hung breathless and shadows were closeted.  As a child he had found his own shadow in them.  He had felt this is where my shadow lives.  What he knew about the life of his shadow he knew from visiting these places.  He felt his shadow lived a separate life, and he might have guessed it was a quiet one, judging by holding still within these places where he met his shadow.  Instead, he felt the quiet life was really his, that his shadow was living in a between time he held open for him, and he, Manny, was his shadow and life in essence is inhabited in its core by this shadow, a non-being or complete being whose substance is emptiness.  A being who was nothing more or less than the origin inside nothingness of each and every thought he had about himself which slipped away as soon as it was thought. 

     When he read he submerged himself in this spellbound time and silence.  He read far in advance of his years, but it was never for the story, it was for this rapt medium in which the stories lived.  While reading he could feel this lost time, as if he had gone into the place behind his building between the high brick walls where ragweed and a spindly acacia grew in the dank soil and all the traffic noises were distant and voices sounded plaintive. 

      Early on, precocious reader that he became, he would pick a novel from the racks in the library, and still standing, let it  fall open along the parts in its spine to those buried sections where the woman disrobed.  Soon, he was schooled enough in novels that he could anticipate these sections from the description of an ankle, from a name, an adjective, and jump ahead, touching down only to verify his route, splicing out the rest of the story. 

     Absolutely quieted time gathered deepest in these sections.  The book nearly disappeared there.  He did not seem to be reading anymore but looking through the book, each piece of clothing removed cleaned more words off the page, like wiping fogging from a pane.  The women, their names, Pauline was one he remembered, were like a solvent working on the page.  Whenever her name would appear, all the sentences around it would fade, and when finally he dropped into the section where she opened her blouse and unhooked her bra, it was as if she were unveiling an interior transparency, the secret of the sung whisper her name held in the author's mind.  He did not picture her naked, each sentence that followed her unveiling took him farther from that nakedness.  Her true nakedness was in her name alone which had insured she would undress.  Her name, that one word which held all the empty core of the author; the empty core in which her name echoed, trembling with its charge.  It’s one word, like the one word in the throat of a bell, molding her on the page, creating Pauline. 

     These sections were the still of the still; they had compelled the book.  They were secrets.  The rest of the book settled around them, but these were the places where the axle of silence was still turning, where once again he could feel a humming presence, the inaudible slapping whoop of an immense nearness passing endlessly away.

     Manny puts on the tape labeled "Matsui". 

     He was already phasing out his private practice, refusing new clients and trying to finish therapy with those he had or to pass them on to colleagues, when one of those colleagues called him with a request to see one of his patients who had grown skeptical of him.  Manny demurred but his colleague pleaded and flattered.  He had known Manny a long time and even if Manny were not to actually accept her, he had gone out on a limb and made a now un-retractable case for Manny's being the person most qualified to steer her towards the right therapist.  She had lost trust in him so it was doubtful she would accept an alternative choice if he should have to make it now.   

     Manny asked him, just who am I rescuing you from? He told him a near clinically depressed Japanese-American woman in her early forties.  She was a lawyer, her friends were attorneys, mostly, professionally articulate anyway.  Shrinks were part of their milieu, vocabulary coaches of a sort, social tutors. They were not mystified by therapy.  Shrinks were...what would they say-now that she had lost confidence in him she had no hesitation in relaying what they might say-anachronisms...no, no, antiques.  We have that charm and doubtful utility.  We have more to do with taste than science.  

     Her friends were all too educated to take her depression seriously, too concerned with the degree of commitment a serious response would entail and sensitive to their own hypocrisy when pretending complete concern.  They were more real when sarcastic, or-with true and "loving" friends-when they were blithe. And they were smart enough to want to spare her the verdict of disease, which would inevitably devour her and make them lose her.  She would be particularly awful to lose, they had telephoned him to say. None of the calls seemed forced.  Common to them were descriptions of her beauty.  Her object beauty stirred them to telephone.  The men, that is, the majority of callers.  Eager to advertise their sophistication, their culture.  Their fluency in the art form of love. Pompous collegians all, slipping unconsciously into pornographic reverie, quite amazed, regretful, dumbfounded, their voices becoming breathy over the wire.  Spellbound still, stroking the auto erotic.   

     She was beautiful.  Manny heard.  Reiterated and hitting home.  For example, another prod:  An ex-boyfriend paraphrased:  Her problem was her beauty.  She was a casualty of that fairy curse.  Possessing already the thing whose lack drives the rest of our lives, she could only imitate us, never really getting it, our hunger, he had said, apparently older and wiser now, her shrink remarked.  Wouldn't Manny at least see her, re-route her from there? 

     Manny agreed to that limited service.   

     She entered his office in mid-argument, determined to begin things right away and waste no more time.  Was this the lawyer in her or in her circle of friends?  She entered his office and immediately began her closing statements for her last shrink.  It was a cogent statement, but coming from a complete stranger, the promiscuous trust or the complete, oblivious self-absorption made her seem dowdy nuts, a recluse.

     She was beautiful.  Enough so that he could half believe that sage boyfriend that her pathology resulted from having to memorize the human.  An attempt to inhabit the role, learned at such a distance that only an extreme, a generalization without nuances could be pasted on.  It made her more beautiful.  She looked younger than forty, considerably younger.  The fraying which begins in a woman's thirties had yet to start.  A result, perhaps, of her adopted personality never saturating her.   

     All of her friends had experienced these "dips", she said.  She held up one finger in a stylized gesture.  "Dips" he believed was a term validated by her friends, an antidote to "depression" and should put him on notice she was informed and sentient.  Still distinct from her ailment.  Autonomous.  She had expectations of matriculating through this, and she was impatient.  Why was she dawdling?  Was she retarded?  A failure?  She was becoming at least slightly convinced that part of her tardiness was due to her being Japanese, or that this was becoming a rumor. Her "dip" by being extended was becoming a scandal.  She was becoming solidly Japanese.  Predisposed to adamantine, dogmatic, proud depressions. 

     She paused and clothed herself entirely in her beauty.  Her eyes looked glassy.  Amber.  She was looking at him.  She seemed able to hold such a look a long, long time.  He became uncomfortable.  It was a sexual look.  It was the look of someone used to being beheld with wonder, who possessed the isolation of being unseen past her nakedness. There was, maybe, no way for a lover to reach her.  Flattery would not work, neither would tenderness.  She seemed to have no interest in herself, at least in whatever it was she  symbolized-this would create her mystery, this more actual being beyond reach; more actual because it could be diluted with fictions or through pleasing.   There was nothing to amend and pity, or likely, to cherish.  Nothing personnel to be found and held. 

     "Inscrutable", she added.

     She had an exquisite vocabulary; employed with an idiosyncratic precision when saying certain words.  Words, he thought, which might also describe sexual performance.  He thought every word she etched that ringing way was one that originated in the sexual act, or in sex is where she had uncovered the word's original definition.  Which would have meant-he thought over time as he made a list of them, as he heard them again enunciated on the tape, that distinct stroke in the air still a laceration-that her sex was absolute.  Unpolluted by sentiment and fully awake. Without the reprieve of continuing or evaporation into context and the daily texture. Sovereign. The urge was not inescapable; he doubted its power to persist in her beyond the time she had decided to act.  But then that moment-immediate. Not really a decision but a reflex.   Without a source, and without residue.  The compulsion would leave nothing unused afterwards to shock or disrupt or parole, to make daydreams or expectations, or to force a re-assessment, to fracture and fissure and disassemble, to play pranks. 

     It was the conclusions during the act which were inescapable.  There would be no refuge in oblivion even if it was a more complete oblivion, free of illusions and watchful waiting for promised arrivals.  She achieved oblivion with banal ease while still inside the circumference of punctilious habits.  No splendor of actual time recovered, those intimations of eternity, of brushing on creation.  No disappointment.  There were no dreams to follow, so the razor edged words said.  Eerily precise, inorganic pronunciations, ringing like struck crystal, but echoless, the note radiating into vacuum and then piercing the ear like glass dust.  

     That is what he thought from the beginning before he had enough evidence to reach any conclusion.  His haste should have told him something.  He hoped now, re-listening to the tapes, cringing at his excesses and ethical lapses that this haste of his was diagnostic, for him.  That he had fallen in love.  Inexcusable, professionally, but such things did happen and the point was to not act on them.  And he had not, and it might even be that his ethical and professional lapses had resulted from his efforts to not fall completely.  He could listen to him struggling to recover himself once he had transgressed. Pull back.  With disastrous results, and then he had to think: If I was in love how could I have done these things? Or might he have also seen her more clearly because of the state he was in and even served her better for it?  Couldn't it be that he was gentle after all, that for all the cruelty that inspired him to fall in love, that this state when once attained, for no matter who, no matter how damaged and how peculiar the notes to seduce him, that once in that state then even against his will and supposedly continued sterile judgement, that in spite of himself and who he is, he acts as if in a state of grace, and if he does not, if as the tapes showed he continues to be cruel that such cruelty is not in his control though he may believe at the time he is acting clearly.    

     He thought:  She is beautiful.  He believed she had not been tainted but there was nothing fresh about her beauty, nothing blooming.  Its quality was invulnerability.  It was inured and perfected.  Her beauty arose from an immunity to sex, a disassociation from it.  He required this from it.  It would never have done if sex had requirements for her.  He did not believe it did.  Or, he knew better, eventually, but his requirements could not change.  She failed him.  That really was the outcome. 

     In the tapes from her first month of visits, there was still in her voice something he had denied or been impatient with, which he worked to suppress, and did not believe, or did believe but thought a lapse or jejune or irreverent and might even have been hostilely directed at him.  Now he heard it again. It was a warble, the lush tremolo too much emotion dissolves a voice into, somehow still present in the midst of her depression.  A remnant of an easy sensuality, of joyous times even, discordant with his view of her sexuality.  More normal than he wished or could accept, too expanded and humorous.  Only remnants of it in her voice, the luffing outlines tracing themselves, but persisting for that month.

     And then, in those first few recorded hours, the silvery cascade of her laughter.  He remembered its alarming, sudden presence, its implication of auditing him, of being amused at him, and hears its beauty and finds that it is these bursts of laughter which continue to live, weirdly, as if they were never part of the sessions to be dissolved with them, but were like a defect in the magnetic tape, one of those occasional pops that break the suspension of disbelief, or they are a defect in the actual ribbon of time the tape somehow captured.  These outbursts are like runs in the fabric of silence that is spread between their two voices on the tape, the silence which is the echo of the rectangle of office they sat in now carried along on the flow of the hour and over the edge into the years falling well ward, the silence into which all the rest must be trusted as well, the vectored spell of the transference, the invisible sinews of heart. 

     A musical bar.  Like music it is threaded through time.  It hovers in the room, takes wing and leaves on its own.    

     When she used the word "puerile" she had her father in mind.  It was not his word but it was his leitmotif.  His sardonic relish in her childhood, in innocence.  His jaundiced encouragement and debunking.  He had made her aware even as a child that childhood was puerile.  She knew she was inane.  When he insisted on playing with her and her brother he imitated them and mocked them, and when by adolescence she was taller than he, she felt he thought he was puerile, that he had not grown into an adult but was left in childhood.   

     She painted a clear picture of him, but its ready implanting in Manny had a lot to do with the image she created being racist.  It seemed to picture him, Manny had only to recall press images of   Tojo or Hirahito. A caricature of an Englishmen as a homunculus. This was intentional on her father's part.  His sardonicism.  He wore three piece suits and a derby, and he had a pocket watch in his vest, its chain resting on his toddler's pot belly. 

     He was a cardiologist and he walked to his office, and then he would wear khaki or gabardine shorts with suspenders, and knee socks through which his stocky calves bulged.  And in his back pack, along with his folded pinstripe suit, he carried bricks so he could exercise his heart with the hike.  He was a sight and knew it, stout little Jap trekking along the streets of Los Angeles with his hands locked on his suspenders.  A sight to force on anyone who might believe they had no racist reflexes left.  At this time in Los Angeles many of the gardeners were Japanese, men who had lost their homes and farms during their internment in the Second World War.  Trolls with sad eyes who turned away in shame even from a child.  So self-effacing they were nearly invisible.

     He was subtle only in his ellipses.  His actions were blocky and did not fit together. Everything to know about him was in the gaps, and he purposely constructed his actions crudely leaving these spaces.  He did not fit into his life, but he left it open as to whom to blame.  He had small square hands and was a surgeon.  He had populated the house with grandfather clocks, big tickers he said.  They stood in the master bedroom and living room and dining room.  Their clicking pendulums measured silence and space, our lives’ sham reprieve. They were six, even seven feet tall.  They stood like creditors at an estate auction.  One anthropomorphizes them as a child.  People in a train station.  Stonehenge.

     "These would be more recent associations.  Not that of a child."  Manny wanted to expel the image of the little Jap in Lederhosen.  Manny's description had triggered her sparkling laugh, the word "Lederhosen".  The sexual liberty in the laugh.  He thought: The funny little man slogging away with his bag of rocks, dumb as a box of rocks, this master of the heart.  What more apt description of the vainglorious quest of the phallus, of its narrow minded and comical usurpation of the heart?  Or of a therapist, a shrink?

     He had her lie on the couch, an unusual practice for him with depressed patients.  She had toed off her heels. It had seemed risque to him, as if she knew this was not his common practice and he was getting her into bed. 

     She lay back cautiously, lowering herself in stages, careful for her hair.  She was in black stockings.  She patted her lap to flatten her skirt.  The skirt was deeply pleated, red. There were inconsistencies or individual touches in the way she dressed.  It was somewhat whorish, costume-like, and purposely innocent, like a child's pathetic wearing of adult talismans. Sitting out of sight behind her, he studied her legs.  The skirt was short and it was pulled halfway up her knees.  They were shapely legs, but what held his attention was the way the toes had been left to point in.  It made her seem gangly.  Maybe, the word was puerile. 

     "Of course, the size of a parent changes over the years, in relation."  He had interrupted her from the beginning.  Poor therapeutic practice.  He could attribute it to a depressive's tendency to bog in details and obsessions; they needed a nudge.  But, he more than nudged.  He pulled her along.  He had filled in spaces.  She had difficulty telling a story unless she was given the lines, and then she could recite it with the conviction of testimony.  Her depression must have worsened this tendency to be told her own story, or it may well have contributed to its onset, but lying on the couch she would echo what he had said in previous sessions.   

    He could see her eyelashes, their tiny spikes above her smooth forehead.  They were fake eyelashes.  When had she first added them?  They were rather awful.  She was careful with her toilette.  The eyelashes cheapened her face.  They were nearly grotesque, doll-like.  She was powdering her face more heavily too.  She was beginning to look like one of those Japanese dolls in a cage of glass.  And mime like, too.  She once came in so thickly powdered he could see the red rims of her eyes.  She wore a mime’s tear wounded face. 

     Here he was talking.  He was dispelling the image of the laboring, futile homunculus in which he felt implicated. 

     "You've been describing a bull in a China shop.  But, you would have me imagine the destruction going on in complete silence.  Really, a bull reversed.  A bull that never did gallop through all these clocks, and who you wished would.  You have, let us say, set up the arena for him, everything is in suspense, and nothing happens."

     "He beat me."

     "Or maybe not.  Maybe, he neglected to beat you, or to pay you sufficient attention at all.  Maybe, you are talking about a large unmet need and have built the machinery large enough to meet it, when really, the neglect, for all of its results which must appear so enormous, was really just preoccupation with work.  To him, at the time, how must it have appeared, shushing you when he read the newspaper?  Not as very much, but now you must create a stage set for a giant.  But even you doubt it.  He cannot reach the furniture or utter a peep. 

     "He beat me."

     "Spanked you.  He shouldn't have.  But it is out of proportion to make it seem he engineered his life around these actions, ridiculous as they were.  Not necessary, for example, that he interpret the heart as a stony muscle.  That he would have to trudge miles with bricks on his back in order to toughen himself enough to slap you.  He should never have done it, but you must consider that unjust as it is, the event had little significance for him and you must stop trying to seduce him into a dark relationship filled with diverted urges because you have not outgrown a childish fixation, possibly the insult of not being taken seriously."

     "Doctor Coeburn thought we should concentrate on him.  There are indications of abuse."

     "I thought you were here because you found Doctor Coeburn's approach unsatisfactory.  Of course, some parts may seem more unsatisfactory than others, but I think aggrandizing neglect into vendetta against childhood is a vendetta in itself and detours us from more useful work." 

     He could make plausible arguments in favor of his approach to this patient.  Especially as a calculated effort to directly oppose Doctor Coeburn's program that had led to her addiction to drugs and which became a rationalization for administering them. He understood Coeburn's strategy.  Coeburn had let himself be guided by the truisms of the craft.  While giving her meds, he was helping her fabricate a biography that would meet her expectations for therapy, a biography she had memorized and recited in grammar school monotone.  Manny never believed in this approach for her, and now, while listening to the tapes he could hear his disbelief.  But, he heard something else as well, a whisper different and independent of both diagnosis and psychoanalysis.  Back then it had yet to gel beyond cues, a disembodied whisper from the wings, guiding the action on stage while seeming contrary to it.  He can he hear it directly now.  It says: None of what we actually possess in our memories is sufficient to explain or justify us, or to renew us or to give us hope we were ever feeling creatures now fallen and might be made so once again.

     Already this was whispering through him nearly twenty years ago when he had just embarked on his career as professor of psychoanalysis, teaching the methods of talk therapy and re-captured narrative to new generations.  Perhaps its dismal conclusions led to his infatuation with Matsui and to his prescribing medications, though he believed them futile and destructive in most cases.   

     Over the course of her therapy they tried four or five different drugs, some to offset side effects of the others.  By the time of her suicide she was carrying a plastic, egg carton-looking container to keep all her pills sorted according to the time of day they were to be taken.  She killed herself with the sleeping pills he had prescribed.  By the time she died she was on such a cocktail of drugs she was narcoleptic.  She would conk out three or four times during a fifty minute session. 

     She habitually combed her fingers through her hair.  The motion lengthened her spine and lifted her breasts.  It was luxurious enough to be post coital; compulsive as nit picking.

     She was not day dreaming, it was more like a petit mal, as blank and untraceable. It opened a window to her nakedness. Not so much the outline of her body etched in the blouse, but her absence while she stroked her hair-it let him enter. He experienced it from within, in her place, almost as a service, since she would not. He allowed himself to think. 

     He had her walk through certain actions for him.  He said she needed to make herself present in them.  

     He believed she could enter daydreams, and he could use her as a vessel, that hers was a special unconsciousness that did not dispel these states of aphasia when scrutinized. She would not be noticed in them; she would be accepted as one of the creatures that dwell there, creatures that exist in dreams.  Her existence was so diaphanous she could pass among all those beings of mind which have in common amnesia for the world.        

     He accompanied her through the stages of undressing, looking with her at her naked body in a mirror, reminding her to look carefully and describe and remember. She would, he believed, if it were left to her, sit upon her bed, perhaps in the morning, stroking her hair this way, and her naked thighs would be crossed and there would be the delta of her pubic hair against the white of sheet and thigh, and she would be inside that claustrophobic and selfless trance of the voyeur, and he could be stitched into it, found there too, quite as non-existent as she.

     He meant her to hem him into this fata morgana that she occupied in full absence, and thus as naively as he did.  He meant her to trace it for him in the ether: her cinched waist and her rib cage-delicate, destitute, like battens for wings-while she sat in the diffuse light of morning that is more night's spindrift than daylight. And recovering them muted, mending them back into her from where they had been taken, putting his fingers inside hers, he would, while hidden within her, stroke all those strings of dream and agony that had vibrated in the night and then quieted their chords into silence.  

     He had her lie on the couch.  He sat behind her head. From time to time her hands reached up and loomed her black hair, otherwise she rested them on her belly, occasionally ironing her skirt.  He had his note pad, he made his jottings, but usually his eyes flowed over the foreshortened landscape of her reclining body.  He noticed her hands were oddly fetal, the palms overly narrow and unlined. Once, when she was crying, he gave her hand a comforting squeeze.  It was cool and lifeless in his hand, but when he released it, it was as if it had come to life on its own.  With the clairvoyance of a blind person's hand it sought out his fingers and held onto two of them, feeling extraordinarily small in his palm, the tiny knobs of her knuckles, and other than the knuckles, boneless.  His breath caught in his throat.  He hurriedly disengaged his hand.  She may not have even noticed.  Her hand returned to her lap to lay inert.      

     "So, it was over with Benny.  Benny.  He introduced himself as Benny?"

     "He was introduced to me."

     "Of course.  As Benny or Bernard?"

     "Benny.  I don't know if he's a Bernard."

     "No?  Never.  But, being set up with a Benny, how seriously do you think your friends were taking you?  What could your expectations have been for a Benny?  Not too high.  You must have been reluctant from the beginning.  They were setting up two people appropriate for each other and one's a Benny.  You disposed of him quickly."

     "It did not work."

     "How much could you have wanted it to?  Two weeks is less than you usually invest.  What did you think of their setting you up with someone Japanese?  Did you think they were abandoning you?"

     "I don't.  That is strange.  I never thought of it that way.  I don't think I understand what you're implying."

     "How much insight is demanded to set up two