The Uses of Enchantment (24 page)

“Of you,” Mary said.

“Because I stumbled on the truth? For that I’m to be distrusted?”

“You’re to be distrusted because your motives were…suspect.”

“I was doing my job,” Roz said. “You were sexually abused by a man and you were given permission by your therapist to pretend that you weren’t. Not only did he give you permission—he made you famous. But you don’t distrust me. The problem, Mary, is that you find my entire profession suspect.”

Mary stared at the floor—at the new carpet that was a tastefully old carpet, a threadbare brown and orange and purple kilim—and experienced a shot of sudden clarity about a very shallow thing. Not an epiphany, since the subject matter was so banal. A baniphany, then. Her baniphany was this: Roz had hired a decorator. The office colors—orange, purple, dark red—were the sort of colors no amateur would dare toss together. It required a guild-validated pro to assemble something so confidently hideous. Roz had hired a decorator and maybe she’d even hired a personal publicist, one who had suggested that she exchange her hemp layers for the more subdued and mainstream-ugly suit dress. Assertive without being overtly feminist. Authoritative but not dykey. Cultured but not elitist.

“Isn’t that true?” Roz pushed.

Mary met the single eye of a mule-faced fish. Her blood felt thin and oxygenless, as though she were trying to breathe at a very high altitude.

“Without sounding disrespectful,” Mary said, “I think your profession shares more in common with fiction than with science.”

“Psychoanalysis is a shared creative endeavor,” Roz said. “Some scholars believe that Freud was more artist than scientist.”

“I thought you hated Freud,” Mary said.

“I ‘hate’ Freud in the way that I ‘hate’ any father figure—as a useful and ultimately healthy means of transcending the implied authority he has over me.”

Mary scoffed.

“What,” Roz said.

“You have an answer for everything,” Mary said.

“It’s that kind of knee-jerk defensiveness that prevents you from wrestling with your root conflict,” Roz said. “Something your mother finally came to understand.”

Mary’s eyeballs burned. Her mother, she was dying to point out,
despised
Roz Biedelman. Yet her mother had refused her daughter’s overtures and turned to…Roz? It didn’t make any sense.

“Here,” Roz said.

Mary, her vision asway, tried to focus on Roz’s extended hand, offering her a tissue.

“What,” Mary said. “I don’t need that.”

“Yes you do,” Roz said. “You’re crying.”

“I’m not
crying
,” Mary said.

“Don’t worry,” Roz said. “I won’t consider it a sign of anything.”

“Of weakness? Of defeat?” Mary made brutal swipes at her cheeks.

“You’re bereaved,” Roz said.

I’m enraged, Mary thought. How dare she allow herself to cry in front of this woman? How dare she be unable to cry at her mother’s funeral, only to dissolve in front of Roz fucking Biedelman?

“Because of your lack of closure with your mother, you’re unable to mourn her.”

Apparently not
, Mary thought to herself as her eyes leaked in an undifferentiated stream.

“Guilt has a way of transforming into rage, which can prohibit the grieving process indefinitely. Which is why I’m happy you decided to find me, even if it is too late to make things right with your mother in person.”

“Bluntly put,” Mary said.

“I’m stating a fact,” Roz said. “Your mother is dead. What you failed to tell her while she was alive is what she will always fail to know from you. But there are other ways of knowing things. After all, you may not have been the most reliable source of information.”

Mary blew her nose, wiped her eyes, wadded the tissue, shoved the evidence of her breakdown into her coat pocket.

“I’m so tired…” Mary began.

“Of course you are,” Roz said.

“I’m so tired of
circumlocution
,” Mary said. “Is there some kind of therapist protocol against speaking in plain language?
Say what you mean
.”

“Fine,” Roz said. “What would you like me to say? You seem to already know what you’d like me to say.”

“Tell me that my mother came to see you.”

“Your mother came to see me,” Roz said.

“As your friend? As your patient?”

“I can’t really answer that question.”

“Of course you can’t,” Mary said bitterly.

“This may be difficult for you to accept,” Roz said. “But sometimes the only person who can understand what you’re going through is a person who has shared that experience. I know that contradicts what I’m supposed to believe is therapeutically possible as an unbiased observer—but I can admit that some relationships are more predisposed to succeed due to a familiarity with the material.”

“
The material
.”

“With you.”

Mary experienced a numbing sensation beginning at her temples, spreading under her forehead. This wasn’t rage; this was shame, pure and simple. Shame that her mother had confessed to Roz Biedelman feelings she’d never been able to express to Mary, or to anyone else in their family. Mary would have felt betrayed if she didn’t believe, on some level, that she deserved it.

“You mother came to me after she learned that she was sick,” Roz continued.

Mary stared at Roz, the numbing sensation subsiding.

“She came to you,” Mary said.

Roz nodded.

“Out of the blue,” Roz said. “Trust me, I was as surprised as you are now.”

“Out of the blue,” Mary said, her shame loosening further as she touched the letter in her pocket.
Roz, as usual, was full of shit
. “She just picked up the phone and called you.”

“Your mother was a complicated woman, I don’t need to tell you that.”

“Right,” Mary said. “Do you know why I’m here out of the blue?”

“What matters is that
you
know why you’re here.”

Mary nodded. “I think I can answer that question.”

Mary withdrew the letter from her coat pocket. She handed it to Roz.

Roz did not take the letter. It dangled between them, shuddering in a draft from the partially opened windows.

“I wonder which out of the blue came first,” Mary said. “My mother’s phone call to you, or the letter you sent to her.”

Roz still refused to take the letter.

“Read it,” Mary said.

“I don’t have to read it,” Roz said.

“No?” Mary said.

“No,” Roz said. “Does that make me guilty of something in your mind?”

“Me, and my perception of things, are not the issues here.”

“Fine,” Roz said. “What are the issues?”

“Despite how you’ve characterized my mother’s actions, in fact you were the one who contacted her first.”

Roz nodded in a tolerant way that Mary did not for a second mistake for agreement. Roz, Mary realized, was as attached—if not more attached—to vagueness than she was. Her approach to therapy was about obfuscating every obvious thing. Maybe it was nothing more—or less—cynical than a business survival technique she learned in graduate school. A way to ensure a consistent patient base. Shy away from anything concrete; shatter it into a diffuse powder. Maintain the mystery above all else.

“I had a very good reason to contact your mother,” Roz said.

“A good enough reason to lie to me, apparently.”

“I had a good reason,” Roz repeated.

“Does it have anything to do with Bettina Spencer?”

Roz removed the glasses from her knee, breathed on the left lens and scrubbed it on her sleeve, returned the glasses to her face.

“Bettina Spencer-Weeks,” Roz said. “What do you know about Bettina?”

“That she left your office building today at five. That she had tea at the bookstore you bully into selling your books. That she shoplifted some greeting cards.”

“You were spying on her,” Roz said.

“I was coming to see you and I saw Bettina. I followed her.”

“How curious,” Roz said. “In all senses of the word. You’ve obviously chosen the wrong profession—you’re a high-school gym teacher?”

“I work for the admissions department.”

“Your talents for subterfuge are going to waste.”

“As are your talents for career counseling,” Mary said.

Roz flashed Mary a bemused grin. She enjoys this, Mary thought. This sort of tinged-with-hostility repartee was Roz’s idea of a great way to pass the early evening.

“But about Bettina,” Mary said.

“What about Bettina? She remains a narcissist with a minor shoplifting problem.”

“It’s an improvement over a sociopath who burns down libraries.”

“She recently set fire to the potting shed of a neighbor she dislikes. By the way this is not to leave this room, this information.”

“You think I’ll trust you because you’ve shown trust in me.”

“I’m satisfying your curiosity about Bettina.”

“But you’ve broken another person’s trust so that I’ll trust you. Eventually I’ll put two and two together and realize that you’ll break my trust in order to gain the trust of another. A risky gambit.”

“One that, with you, will pay off.”

“You’re so confident?”

Roz shrugged. “You dislike me, Mary. I’m appealing to your sense of curiosity, which is the only thing I can appeal to. I have information that you need.”

Mary didn’t respond. Roz was irritating. She was not stupid.

“Bettina suffers from a personality disorder that most in my field consider incurable.”

“Which doesn’t prevent you from taking her money every week,” Mary said.

“Narcissists can’t be cured, but they should be managed. They can cause a lot of harm otherwise—as Bettina has already proven.”

The fish tank emitted a loud belch.

“I suppose you’re referring to Bettina’s lawsuit against Dr. Hammer,” Mary said.

“Actually, I was referring to the arson incident.”

“But still, if she’s a harm-causing narcissist, then there’s a good chance that her case against Dr. Hammer was just another opportunity to make her mark via destruction of an innocent person, right?”

“Dr. Hammer was not an innocent person,” Roz said.

“So you maintain. But of course you would have to, given you aligned yourself with Bettina during the court case.”

“
Aligned
,” Roz said. “You make me sound so sinister.”

“You aligned yourself with Bettina.”

“My lawyer’s idea,” Roz said, swiveling away from Mary to attend to a non-important diversionary something on her desk.

“Which couldn’t have pleased you more. You hated him.”

Roz flipped through her date book; she uncapped a pen and copied something onto a notepad. She swiveled back toward Mary.

“If you don’t mind me telling you a few things about yourself, Mary: You cling to an extremely simplistic and infantile way of viewing the world, and the people in it. You’re unforgiving. A grudge holder. In my business, we might say that you haven’t properly separated from your parents. In your case specifically, your mother.”

On the contrary, Mary thought. She’d never been so separated from a person.

“You still haven’t explained why Bettina is your patient.”

“I thought I just explained her problems in detail.”

“Why
you
,” Mary said. “If that’s not a conflict of interest…”

“Bettina and I were engaged in a patient-doctor relationship long before the lawsuit,” Roz said. “Read through the code of conduct manual published by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Board. I’ve violated not a single subsection.”

“I’m sure Dr. Hammer wouldn’t feel violated to know you’re still seeing his most infamous patient.”

“You’re so protective of him,” Roz observed. “You must think he needs protecting.”

“Exactly,” Mary said. “Which should tell you something.”

“It tells me that your mother’s not the only person from whom you’re seeking forgiveness,” Roz said. “Fortunately for you, Dr. Hammer is still alive. It’s not to late to find him and set things right.”

“What it should tell you is that I lied to him about being abducted,” Mary said. “And he correctly wrote a book detailing how I fabricated the whole thing. Then his life was ruined.”

“How powerful you must believe yourself to be,” Roz said. “A sixteen-year-old girl ruining the life of an adult man.”

“I didn’t ruin his life,” Mary said. “You did.”

“Really,” Roz said. “I didn’t see you rushing to his defense when it counted. When I claimed that your fabrications weren’t fabrications at all. When I claimed that you had actually been sexually abused by an adult man. If I was wrong, Mary, why didn’t you say so?”

Mary grew light-headed. “It was—a difficult choice,” she said. “I was young. I didn’t realize what would come of it.”

“Only good things could have come of it,” Roz said. “Dr. Hammer’s career would have been saved. And your mother—nobody was more invested in Dr. Hammer’s theory than your mother. She wanted
so desperately
to believe that you’d been lying. That you’d never been abducted or sexually molested, that you merely suffered from an overactive imagination. So I find it hard to accept, Mary, given the many benefits of testifying on behalf of Dr. Hammer, that you couldn’t bring yourself to do so. Where was this ‘choice’?”

Mary locked eyes again with a stone-faced fish.
Exactly
, the fish seconded.
Where was this choice?
From this distance—fourteen years—she was having a hard time recapturing the difficulty of the choice. It seemed so obvious in retrospect. Testify that Dr. Hammer was right. He had rightly created his hyper radiance theory, about girls who come of age in a sexually repressed society, girls who fabricate abduction and abuses because they’re unable to act out in a directly sexual way without risking cultural shame. He had spun her testimony into a theory involving adolescent girls in New England and regardless of what you thought of his theory, it had been based on this supposed truth: she’d lied.

“I can see this conversation is upsetting you,” Roz said.

“I’m fine,” Mary said.

“Maybe we should return to your original reason for coming here tonight.”

“My original, selfish reason.”