thirteen

After a near arrest in LA Betty Gordon, a.k.a. Justine Fast, returned to New York on the red-eye and took a taxi with her rose-colored roll-on luggage to her ex-boyfriend’s apartment in SoHo. He wasn’t there. Wherever he was he wasn’t answering her cell. The doorman wouldn’t let her wait in the apartment even though she had kept her key. No girls, he had been told, none at all. She called her mother.

It had come to that.

She had dark circles under her eyes, a result of mascara that had spread like an oil spill and fatigue that had been caused by her inability to sleep without the aids she had a few weeks ago declared off limits. The flickering light within her burned sufficiently to ignite her wish to live and live on, to counter the desire to sleep forever, to want to go home and start again.

Her mother took one look at her daughter, the stale nicotine smell filled her nostrils as she pulled her child, no longer a child, into her arms and led her to her old room, which now had a couch bed, a desk for her mother’s computer, and a new carpet. Betty remembered what had happened to the old carpet. The posters were down, the lipstick messages on the mirror were gone. The room had been sanitized as if a victim of an infectious disease had died there. Betty understood. She had tried to erase herself so she couldn’t blame her mother for finishing the job.

Betty took a shower and changed her clothes before her father came home from his office. Her hair was cut like a boy’s. Blue, pink, crimson, yellow, purple spiked through her head: a fading firecracker, lights sinking in the moonless sky. Her father kept his eyes away from her arms. He didn’t want to see what might be there. Dr. Berman might see me, she said. No, said her father. She’s not well.

What? said Betty.

She’s not young, said her mother.

I know, said Betty. I want to see her, she said.

You can’t, said her father.

I can, said Betty.

No, said her father, you can’t. But you can see Dr. H.

Dr. H. opened the door to his new patient. He showed her the coat closet. He thought about Dr. Berman. She would not have appreciated the tattoo he saw on his patient’s neck when she bent down to pick up the red leather bag that she then held close to her chest while inspecting him carefully. He sat still and let her absorb his size, his blue shirt, the glasses that slipped a little to the left, the receding hairline, the jagged scar on his left hand where he had cut himself while carving the Thanksgiving turkey.

You’re ordinary, she said.

Is ordinary so bad? he asked.

Yes, she said.

Tell me why, he said.

He looked at her and smiled. It was a shy smile but it cast a glow into the consulting room. He saw the pieces of her flying around in her head. He saw the little girl waking from a night terror and screaming for her mother. He saw the fragile glass of her soul, tipping back and forth, ready to fall, and he saw the colors of her hair, brave sparks. She was still there.

I want to be special, she said.

You are special, he said. Everyone is.

She sighed.

Blah, blah, blah, she said.

What do you hope for? he asked.

And Betty couldn’t answer because she hoped for so much at once and she had little hope.

Dr. H. waited.

I want to see Dr. Berman, she said.

Let’s try, he said, you and me, and see if we can work together.

I don’t need a shrink, she said to her father, knowing the word irritated him. I need a God with many arms.

Try the Asia Society gift shop, said her father.

Betty’s agent called her. There’s a part for you in the new Coen brothers script. You wanna try for it? They called and asked for you.

No, she said. Not now.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like it when the cameras were on her face. She liked it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want people to know her name. She did. It was just that she wanted to stay home now. She didn’t want her name in the tabloids. What did she want? How should she know?

What do I want? she asked Dr. H.

You tell me, he said.

She rose from her chair, glared at him. Useless, she said, you are useless.

But two days later she was there at the appointed hour. Dr. H. was not surprised.

Betty met her old high school friend in a wine bar and amid the dark bottles, the cheese plates, the noise, the rising drumbeat of trysts and tales of betrayal, movies liked or not, raises denied or won, romances budding or fading, she spoke of her old boyfriend. Had she really loved him? Had she ever really loved anyone? How do you know if you love someone? she asked her friend. You know, said her friend. Betty sipped at her fake beer. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she thought. Stop being such a baby. The word stop rolled around again and again in her brain. I could stop everything if I wanted to, she said to herself. Do I want to?

Two tables over someone recognized Betty. That’s Justine Fast. Heads turned, staring. I’m surprised she’s not in prison, a loud voice offered. Betty turned her head to the left. She wanted them to see her best side, the one that photographed perfectly. She felt ashamed and she felt excited. She was someone. Wasn’t she someone? It was good to be someone. It was not good to be someone. Betty’s friend’s cell phone rang. She turned her back to Betty and in order to block the noise from the bar put her other hand over her ear. She slipped down from her high stool and stood against the wall, her back to the room. Betty put her hand in the backpack that had been left on the floor. In an instant she had zipped open the small pocket, fished out a wallet, emptied its contents into her own lap, and replaced the wallet.

Betty’s friend had to go. Her sister was waiting uptown.

Alone in the bar, Betty fondled the dollars in her lap. Am I a thief? she wondered. Would she report this act to Dr. H.? Would he be shocked? He was not allowed to be shocked. It would be unprofessional of him to be shocked. It would be a joy to shock him. Would he admire her daring? Maybe.

Dr. H. asked Betty, Were you angry at your friend?

No, I just thought it would be cool to defund her.

Did you think she had something else you wanted? Dr. H. leaned forward in his chair. There was no note of accusation in his tone. On the other hand, no admiration either.

Maybe, said Betty.

What? he asked.

It’s exciting to take things, said Betty.

I imagine so, said Dr. H., rising to indicate their time was up.

Paxil, Zoloft, the right amount of which was hard to determine: Dr. H. wrote the Rx, but only for a few at a time. Betty was given by her aunt a not very frequently used gym membership. She endured a long, very boring test to see if attention deficit disorder contributed to her jangled nerves. She told her periodontist that she didn’t want to be Justine anymore but wasn’t fond of Betty either. If it was attention deficit disorder they would use Ritalin. It wasn’t. Sometimes she slept too long into the late morning. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep at all. A psychologist administered an IQ test. Betty didn’t want to take the test. She gave wild answers or no answers. The results were not useful.

A lost lamb, said her mother.

A not so adorable wolf, said her father.

What did we do wrong? asked her mother for the ten thousandth time.

I’m not talking about this anymore said her father, although he would, in bed, at dinner, after the movies, on a walk in the park.

She was good in front of the camera, said her mother.

So was Lassie, said her father.

The months passed. She mostly made her appointments.

The world is corrupt, she said. Every politician lies. No one cares about you if you’re poor and if you try to be someone a crazy person will kill you. Jodie Foster was almost murdered. John Lennon is dead.

Woody Allen lives, said Dr. H.

I’d like to get him in bed, said Betty.

He’d like that, thought Dr. H., but waited for her to continue.

As she sat across from him he smelled her perfume, applied like insect repellent in black fly season. She wasn’t kind. She had a guilty conscience, a superego that plagued her, but she knew how to keep her self-criticism from changing her plans. She rejected his interpretations. She wore skirts so short he had to focus his eyes on the seventeenth century print of an Italian landscape he had purchased in Florence years ago that hung just above her head.

However, Dr. H. was a patient man. He and the Paxil would win in the end. It was just a matter of time. Did he have the time before something happened, an overdose, a major theft that landed her in prison, a drunken evening that would end in a car crash, in a drowning in a swimming pool, a fall from a tree she had climbed so she could be above everyone else. If she had plans for ending her life she did not tell him. Sometimes she stayed home and sulked in her bedroom, watching TV until the stations went off the air and then opening her iPod and downloading streaming rap music until dawn. At least that kind of evening would lead to morning, so thought Dr. H.

Was she taking drugs other than the ones he was prescribing for her? Dr. H. thought not. He wanted to think not. Sometimes when she was in his office he felt her presence as if a small bird were flying about the room, its heart beating in terror, its wings frayed, its beak pecking wildly at anything in its way, its small feet clinging to shelf, to book, to clock, to arm of the chair, to the box of crayons he kept for children, to doorknob, a stray feather falling here and there, a cold-eyed canary bird moving and moving so you could not hold it in your hands, so you could not bring it in close to your chest, so you could not let your breath flow onto its back and soothe that flipping, frightened heart.

And once in a while she would come in and sit quietly in the chair and say nothing for a long while and he would wonder if she was sleeping even though her eyes were open. He would wonder if she had taken too many or too few of his prescriptions. He would wonder if she was still there and would come back before the end of the session. When that happened he felt as if she were trying to punish him. But maybe he was judging himself, found himself wanting, was impatient with his own skills, and maybe she knew that and worried about his lack of faith in her, in himself. He really hated the sessions that were filled with this awful quiet no words of his could alter.

Betty, you could go back to school, said her mother.

Call your agent, said her father.

I don’t want to act, she said.

But that is all you wanted to do for years, said her mother.

It’s what you wanted me to do, said Betty.

It is not. I didn’t care, said her mother. You were always dressing up, pretending to be this or that. You loved the music videos. You wanted voice lessons and acting lessons. I wanted you to be a doctor. I wanted you to pass algebra.

You need a face-lift, Betty said to her mother. Your chins are sagging. Her mother left the room.

At her next appointment with Dr. H. she reported the scene to Dr. H. She began to sing, On top of Old Smokey I lost my true love. He asked her if her mother was her true love? Her, never, said Betty. Your father? he offered. That remark was followed by a long silence, a silence that lasted until the end of the session.

One Thursday, she said, I might join the army.

Christ, Dr. H. thought, and bit his inner cheek. Tell me what that might be like, he said.

One Tuesday she came to her session in a low-cut silk dress and pearls around her neck. Was it a double strand? She seemed to have come to life from the cover of a fashion magazine, the one Dr. H. kept on a side table in his waiting room, except for the fact that all the colors of the rainbow still ran through her hair as if she were a child’s toy in the window of a cut-rate drugstore. The effect was to combine Andy Warhol with Princess Diana.

Do you like my pearls? she asked as she sat down.

Did you pay for them? he asked.

Guess? she said to him.

Did you pay for them? he asked again.

She wasn’t going to answer him, which was its own answer.

He knew the diagnosis. This borderline word that brought to mind smugglers and desperate immigrants, but actually referred to the wall between reason and unreason: boiling thoughts that had lost their manners. This line served as the barrier to unseemly excitement, terrible rage, calamitous shards of the soul crossing the border, invading the daylight, denting the ego, leaving graffiti to bleed across the superego, screaming through the halls of the self.

But the diagnosis, the cold words in the manual, they could not begin to describe the thing in Betty, the things in Betty, that tormented her. It was as if a thousand roaches invaded the kitchen night after night, and no poison spray would stop them, no rank odor prevent their arrival, no stepping on them or sweeping them up in the best of Dyson vacuums. They came, these roaches of the mind, through the cracks, through the tiles on the floor, out of the cabinets, everywhere roaches sneak and hide. And when he saw Betty that way Dr. H. felt anger, not at Betty, but at the illness he intended to vanquish. He knew the mighty strength of his enemy, and he saw clearly the fragile hold on life held by his patient, the one with the smile he found himself increasingly eager to evoke, anxious to encourage. Careful, he said to himself, very careful.

Betty hung up on her agent when he called again to press her to audition for a new TV series. Betty went to the park and sat on a bench in the playground. She watched the up and down and in and out of the climbing rails. She saw the children hanging by their hands from bars, slipping down the slide, crossing small bridges, swinging on a tire held by a chain to the entire contraption. She watched carefully the faces of the children. She was checking for fear. Sometimes she saw it. Just before the push-off, the reach of a hand to a bar, just before the foot leans into a higher step, fear flushes across the child’s face. Betty felt sad sitting there. Do I want children one day? she asked herself. Yes, every hormone, every cell, nucleus, acid, protein, said to her. No, she said to herself, any child of mine would just be like me.

She told Dr. H. about her visit to the playground. She told him that she had sat on the edge of the sandbox and taken off her pearls and buried them a few inches down in the sand that was not like beach sand but like the crumble of gravestones. And what did you hope would happen to the pearls? asked Dr. H.

A little girl would find them and her mother would let her take them home and use them for dress-up.

Anything else about the little girl? asked Dr. H.

No, said Betty.

What might happen? asked Dr. H.

The little girl dies of leukemia and her divorced mother buries her with the pearls she used to wear when she played at being a princess.

Not such a happy story, said Dr. H.

No, agreed Betty.

Which is how the subject of death entered the consulting room.

Some months later, as Dr. H. was gently reminding his patient that most young women her age were preparing for a profession, to do something in the real world, and she was reminding him that she had already earned enough money to live for years and years and she wasn’t interested in money anyway. He said, Let’s pretend you needed to do something, what would it be?

She knew. She knew exactly. I would write books for children. I would write good books for children.

He said, I wouldn’t stop you.

Something is stopping me, she said, and began to cry. Makeup ran, blotches came, she caught tears on her tongue. She began to have trouble breathing. The session was over. At the door she turned around and said, I feel dizzy. Dr. H. knew she was an actress and could faint whenever she wanted. He would rather she didn’t: not in his office. He would really rather she didn’t.

And so of course there was a new boyfriend. Gregg was a cameraman with one of the national news shows. They met in a club. They screamed out their names to one another as the lights circled around. They danced a war dance or was it a love dance for several hours before they exchanged names. He knew who she was or had been. He was impressed but not cowed. She liked his face. He was political. She was pre-political. She intended to have more opinions one day. He lived in Washington Heights in an apartment with a view of the river and the rocky cliffs on the Jersey side. He had grown up in Maine and he had a stern, weathered look, a young man who couldn’t be melted down or blown apart and he had no drug history. He drank only moderately and he, best of all, had no girlfriend, the last one having left him for her boss, receiving a far better job as a reward. He had no weird sexual habits and if his fantasies were dark he didn’t share them with her. Betty gained a few pounds and was trying to quit smoking. He didn’t like the trace of smoke that stuck to her body, remained in her ears, in her armpits, in the folds of her clothes.

I’ll move in with him, she said to her mother. You just met him, her mother said. Wait at least a few months. Why? said Betty. She left the room as her mother was listing the reasons, the wisdom, the necessity of caution. I’ll move in with him, she said to Dr. H., who said, How will you feel if it doesn’t work out? Like hell, she said. But she’d been there before and wasn’t afraid.

He liked classic movies, Casablanca, The Third Man, The Orient Express, Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers. They watched them late at night in his bed. Sometimes he called her Justine. She let him although she preferred Betty. During the day when he was at work Betty went to the gym and she went to see Dr. H. and she went shopping with her mother and she told her agent that she was dropping him in favor of a real life. Good luck, sweetie, he had said, and don’t call if you change your mind. But then Gregg was sent out of town with a show. He would be gone for a few months. She could fly out and visit him, he said. He would be in Cambodia for a look at the death camps there. I don’t think so, she said. It wasn’t the airplane that frightened her. It wasn’t the death camps, which he explained to her were no longer operating. It was something else.

What? asked Dr. H.

I don’t know, said Betty.

And now in the week before he was to leave she turned her face away from him. She was supposed to meet him for dinner at their favorite Indian restaurant near his studio at six o’clock and she never showed up.

She had gone home again. Her mother rushed to bring her an ashtray as she curled up on the couch in her old room. Her face was not clean and her black fishnet stockings were ripped in a revealing place. Is there any rice pudding in the house? she asked her mother. Her mother went into the kitchen to make some. Gregg called. Betty wouldn’t answer the phone or respond to the texts. Damn, said her father, Damn, Damn, Damn.

Dr. H. tried. Did you like Charlotte’s Web? he asked.

Everyone likes Charlotte’s Web, she said. Did you like Curious George, the mischievous monkey? he asked. Not particularly, she said. What then? he asked. Where the Wild Things Are, she said. You wanted to be Max? He was headed somewhere sexual. She saw him coming. No, she said. I wanted to be a wild thing. He waited. I am a wild thing, she said. In the end, he said, Max goes home. I am home, she said. I want to leave home, she added. Good, said Dr. H., who felt like stomping around his office and waving his arms and growling his growl.

Betty bought a blank notebook. She bought some watercolors. She brought them home and stored them on the top shelf of her closet under her press photos. Those she had buried under her sneakers, old sneakers she had meant to throw out but hadn’t. Everything in her closet that wasn’t on a hanger was on the floor. Everything was crumpled and wrinkled and she waited for her mother to straighten it out. Her mother was waiting for her to grow up. It was an impasse. It forced Betty to buy new clothes that were never right, never exactly right.

Tell me about acting, asked Dr. H.

What? she said.

Do you miss it? he asked.

No, she said.

It made me nervous, she said.

How so? he asked.

She told him.

She received a long letter from Gregg. He wished she were with him. He didn’t want anything to happen to her. He had bought her a present in Phnom Penh. He asked her to be careful. He told her that he didn’t want her to steal. He didn’t want her to see her face in the tabloids. He was making good money on this job. He would buy her what she wanted. He thought he could spend his life taking care of her.

I don’t need taking care of, she said to Dr. H.

Of course not, thought Dr. H.

What was wrong with Gregg? wondered Dr. H. Gregg wasn’t his concern.

There was a bad night. It started at a club. The thug at the door hadn’t recognized her. The friends she was with had to vouch for her. She had worn a lace top and it ripped as she was dancing and then she had a few drinks. She was vague on the number. Then this tall woman in black leather boots pushed her when she was already off balance with a glass in her hand and she fell to the floor and the glass broke and she went for the woman and bit her on the neck. Yes, there was a small trickle of blood, but she hadn’t killed her or anything. And then she was thrown out of the club and her friends didn’t come with her and so she was alone on a street that seemed empty and so she screamed some obscenity and then she went looking for a cab and she couldn’t find one and so she walked and she saw what she thought was a monster coming toward her, only it was just a trash can that had been tipped by the wind.

She slept through her next appointment with Dr. H. She slept through her yoga class. Her mother heard her in the bathroom and the sounds were not pleasant.

I need a higher dose, she said to him.

I don’t think so, he said.

You can manage, he added.

I can? she asked.

You can, he said.

As she left he noticed a streak of purple dye and another one of pink running down the back of her neck and disappearing under her T-shirt. For a second he thought it was blood, blood from the brain. Oozing, she’s oozing out of herself, he thought, and then wrote a far more technical, professional sentence in his notebook.

Some months later, after a short vacation in which he went to Belize with his family, he heard a message on his answering machine.

Hi, it’s Betty, I’m going to Cambodia, back in a few weeks, will call.

Good news or bad news, he wasn’t sure.

Gregg met her in the airport. He was tan and seemed taller than she had remembered. He was shy as he grasped her arm. He lost his shyness later in his hotel room. I caught you, he said, I caught you. What did he mean? Was she some kind of lizard scurrying along the tile floor that he had trapped in an upside-down wastebasket? Did she like being caught or didn’t she?

The shoot was over the next week. She went with Gregg on a riverboat ride. It would have been romantic but she didn’t like the rocking motion of the boat and closed her eyes and lay down on a cushion and moaned for the whole four hours. It occurred to her that she had a gift for missing the moment.

She did not steal anything in Cambodia. Not quite true. She took a towel from the hotel. Everyone takes towels from hotels. She took a set of ten postcards from the gift shop only because the girl behind the counter was rude. She took a blue bracelet from a vendor’s cart because the vendor had fallen asleep on a nearby bench and she didn’t want to wake him. But she took nothing that needed to be declared on return. She was pleased.

She seems calmer since she came back from Cambodia, said her mother to her father as they waited for the water to boil for their pasta.

Remember, said her father, she can tack pretty well in a storm. This was a metaphor. She had never gone sailing with him although he had asked her several times.

Her mother said, I should have divorced you years ago. And then a minute later she added, I don’t mean that.

I know you don’t, he said.

I just wish—, he added.

Me too, she said.

The seasons changed and changed again. Hardly anyone recognized Betty as Justine anymore. It was all right with her. Justine Fast had died a grizzly death tied to a cactus in an imaginary desert, ants had eaten out her eyes and crawled across her skin. Minutes before the end of a session she had described this in full detail to Dr. H., who intended to return to the subject as soon as possible.

Gregg wanted to buy Betty a ring but he knew she could steal a better one and that made it hard for him to actually choose one. He finally did. Betty began a children’s story, Once upon a time there was a little girl named Justine. She lived in a castle under the sea. Justine was a girl octopus and she was going to lead the battle of the octopi against the sharks that swam in the nearby reef, consuming baby octopi by the dozens. She was going to do the illustrations. It would be an epic battle. Her name would be on the cover, Betty Gordon.

Dr. Z. and Dr. H. had been to a meeting of the institute’s education committee. One of their faculty had been boring his students so badly that half of them neglected to show up for class. His evaluations by the students were filled with vague phrases of neutral disinterest. They were cautious students even in anonymous evaluations. You never know whom you might need in your professional life. These students were not the sort to demonstrate on the steps of the capital or burn flags of any nation in a public place. Their chemistry experiments never exploded. Their college essays revealed only what they wanted revealed. Nevertheless they were clearly intolerably bored, which in a class on Sexual Fantasy and Its Role in the Doctor-Patient Relationship seemed unnecessary.

He has to go, said Dr. Z.

Dr. H. sighed. He didn’t want to be the one to do it.

We could give him another semester, he suggested.

We could not, Dr. Z. said. What is happening with your movie star?

Her hair is all one color, said Dr. H.

That’s good, said Dr. Z.

Yes, said Dr. H., and it’s green.

Green? said Dr. Z.

Yes, said Dr. H., the color of spring.