Our sessions always started the same way. “How are you?”
“I’M fine, how the hell are YOU?”
As we talked, he would pick at lint on his shirtsleeve, despite the newness of it, despite that there was none—I never saw him wear the same shirt twice, always beautiful, always impeccable (and expensive.) It was imaginary lint, in other words, but he was angry if I pointed that out. “There IS lint,” he said once, holding up nothing between his two fingers for me to see as though something were really there. Another time, nonsensically, "But there should be," and another time again, "Mind your own business."
"Did you know," he began this time, after some minutes of idle observations, his eyes now glittering with the all but certain knowledge I would not know, because as a general rule I was unfamiliar with the references he made—they all seemed ridiculously outdated, his gossip only ever about people long dead—"did you know that in the waning days of her life, Marlene Dietrich was a horrible drunk and addicted to prescription drugs?"
I admitted I did not.
"You do know Marlene Dietrich," he said rather than asked, as though admitting no other possibility.
I said I did, I knew the name anyway, though I might not have been able to pick her out of a lineup.
"Well! What a legendary beauty, I mean sometimes it's hard to really see it, with some of the old stars, the style, the clothes, the black and white and all that..."
I admitted they all did look a little bit alike, except for Marilyn Monroe maybe, I couldn’t tell a Gene Autry from a Gene Simmons (names I’d heard my parents and gay friends mention—I thought my improvisation rather clever.)
He looked at me hard. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck have you been listening to?” He swept it all away with a roll of his eyes. “Anyway.”
And now he became rather solemn, which might signal anything from a serious insight to an elaborate joke I probably wouldn’t understand.
“Miss Marlene Dietrich. I did NOT read about this in her daughter’s biography, mind you, I hate biographies, why on EARTH should I read other people’s biographies? They should be reading mine. But no, it was in another author’s essay—I won’t ask if you are acquainted with HER—” at which point he inserted a slight snort, “—but SHE read the daughter’s account—a daughter, mind you, who had every reason to be jealous of her incandescent mother, a daughter who actually COULD be mistaken for a man in my opinion, but that’s just me—and so of course we have only the word of this pale imitation of a goddess of the silver screen to go on—now there’s an ‘Imitation of Life’—ha! But I believe it.”
Perhaps because I was both hopelessly lost and in thrall to the machinations of his imagination, I asked why he believed “it” and wrote “imitation of life” in my book, as though either were important or might reveal something. My interjections rarely came to much with him. I had my own analyst to process the difficulty of offering therapy to a mind far more dexterous than my own.
“I believe it because I can picture it, if that means anything—I have a VERY vivid imagination—” I interrupted to agree, which pleased him, “—and I can just see it, the whole desperate scene, the filth of it all, dear God—I can even imagine the smell!”
I must have appeared confused, because he caught himself, his sudden crescendo of emotion—eyes wide and almost watering, his shoulders and his whole slim torso lifted up as if in horror—suddenly relaxing at the realization he had as yet not actually mentioned the problem.
“Well as I said, this is a woman of legendary beauty—and legendary appetites—you must have heard the rumors.”
I did not acknowledge this remark because of course I had not, and I knew he knew that I hadn’t; this was a rhetorical statement, rather than a question, addressed not so much to me as to an audience I somehow represented.
“Oh she fucked anything that moved, she was ravenous! I have it on very good authority—” at this he leaned in conspiratorially, lowered his voice, glanced toward the door of his sitting room, “—that she was fascinated by the idea of a donkey show, she believed there was support for similar acts in Greek myth—the mother of the Minotaur, Pasiphaë of course, wife of King Minos, having convinced Daedalus—THAT Daedalus!”—at this he winked knowingly—“to devise for her a contraption, a hollow life-sized cow, into which she fit herself and received the seed of the Cretan Bull and became pregnant…”
He let that little scandal impress itself on me for a moment as he checked his Rolex, before continuing. “Anyway, the rumor is that Dietrich spoke to several well-known sculptors over the years in an attempt to recreate this particular peccadillo, before finally resolving at one point to dispense with the mechanism altogether and simply disguise herself as a Mexican—” he hesitated briefly, “—sex worker in order to perform at one of these so-called donkey shows—was actually furious when she discovered it was all just a ruse, an urban legend to attract horny sailors and other drunken degenerates to Tijuana! Dear me, hopes dashed—one supposes she found other outlets. All for the best, though—talk about Bottoming!”
He seemed to find this all very amusing, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders as if to say pervs will be pervs, which he had in fact said on at least one other occasion, according to my notes.
“I mean, it IS all rather low-brow—but then, sex often is the most primal Muse, taking the form of a cat some say. Or Elizabeth Taylor.” I declared that I had heard of her. “You’re killing me. Do I shock you, Doctor?”
I told him I was not shocked by anything we discussed, which was mostly true. For some reason I assumed the business with the donkey was the dirty secret to which he had originally been referring, but apparently not, because as I waited to see what he might come up with next, a sly smile erupted into dimples on each of his smooth cheeks.
“You didn’t…actually…believe all that…?” he said, letting out a hearty “Ha!” at my confusion—he was always on the edge of hilarity at his own stories. “So. But no, I still haven’t told you what the daughter actually wrote. Dietrich, in the end—drunken, drug-addled, you remember, you can imagine the scene? Good. This Great Beauty, Dietrich—even into her 70s having affairs with men AND women, but vain, oh my dear, yes! So vain—approaching 90, of course, even the most beautiful are but a ruin of their former selves—apparently she refused to leave her bedroom, refused even to allow anyone in to clean, to see her in her reduced state. Imagine! Unwashed bed linens, drunk—the FILTH!” he hissed. “The daughter didn’t actually say it, but I know it… Messed! In her bed!”
At this point he sat up and put his feet on the seat of the chair so that he squatted almost frog-like on the silk upholstery, and looked down at the floor as if there were the aging star’s own filthy sheets—or snakes, or worse!—he seemed almost mesmerized by an image I could not see, his face drawn up into a mask of horror, eyes wide, fingers clawing at his neck, at his cheeks, aghast!
But then, most improbably, he set one foot down on the floor, and the other, and advanced toward me, his horror and demeanor immobilized except for his creeping legs, step by slow, deliberate step as he gazed into my eyes, crossing the room, and just before nearly climbing into my lap, mere inches away, he whispered, “I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille.”
And then he broke character, someone or other he had dreamed up or seen I guessed, and he laughed uproariously, all just a game. He spun around giddily, and pranced back to his seat, checking his watch and declaring, as he always did, preferring not to be caught surprised by the end of our hour, “Oh! Look at the time. We have just a minute—do you have any questions?”
And as I always did, I admitted, yes, thousands, but perhaps we ought to take it up next session, and he clapped, as always, as though he could think of nothing better.
“See you next time! KISS-es!” he declared with one last roll of his eyes, a parting gift with which I was familiar though rarely entirely certain of his intent. He had never mentioned “kisses” before. I chose to ignore it, but made a note later.
A maid showed me into Mrs. Danforth’s morning room, where I was urged to sit by the lady of the house herself. She seemed in particularly anxious spirits, perhaps related to her husband’s extended business in Geneva, my patient had already informed me.
(“She’s not herself when he’s not around to talk her down off the ledge.”
I asked what she was nervous about.
“Me. Obviously.”)
I refused the drink offered, preferring instead to deliver the occasional progress report without delay.
“Mrs. Danforth, I’m not sure progress is really the right word with regard to your son,” I began, addressing her entreaties. “Although it is unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy to know and say half the things William Junior does, he’s completely cogent, articulate, reasonable—most of the time, the lint thing bothers me slightly—”
“This is NOT normal—NONE of this is normal,” Mrs. Danforth declared, taking a long, deep draw on her vape pen. She reached the other shaking hand toward a very full highball glass on the cocktail table, but thinking better of it, instead let it fall helplessly flopping in her lap. “HE is not normal.”
“No,” I agreed, “he is not. But what is normal?”
“NOT THAT!” she almost screamed at me in exasperation. (I could quite see where he got his testiness, if not his genius.)
“William Junior is highly intelligent—the smartest person I’ve ever met, honestly, adult or child…”
She went ahead and picked up that highball glass, nearly draining it in a gulp. “He frightens me.”
“Well, he’s not dangerous,” I said, stifling the laugh that nearly erupted, the sudden sharp pinch of her lips warning Don’t you dare… “He is…animated, I admit—perhaps a future in the theater?” Now the mother rolled her eyes at me. “He has a keen grasp of subjects with which a child his age would normally not have any familiarity, but he is not violent, certainly not a danger to himself or to anyone—I believe him when he says he is an avowed pacifist. Now if he actually ever writes that memoir he keeps threatening…”
I couldn’t help myself frankly, half-hoping to dispense with the overwrought concern for her son’s precociousness, but in the end I also knew that as long as he enjoyed our “conversations” she would have no say in the matter one way or the other, would merely be required to continue writing checks for my hourly fee.
Still, she was not amused by my quip, and scrawling with lightning speed “5,000 + NO/100s” and her elegantly practiced signature, threw the check on the table in front of me.
“Here!” she said. “This should cover today and the next however many sessions. I don’t want to see your face again until next year.” It was early December.
“Thank you,” I said. “Have a Merry Christmas, Mrs. Danforth.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she said, already out the door.
Ohhhh, nice twist there! Excellent story, and nice details are strewn in cleverly all over the place and we are strung along none the wiser until the reveal. Just as the doctor ordered!
Cunning, unexpected writing! I was baffled by the patient's reveal. You outdo yourself each time, Troy!