SHE STRIPPED FOR ME: SAW HER PUSS AND JUGS. UHHHH. KEPT MY HANDS TO MYSELF. My blessing still reigned. Of course it did. I had to have faith in him. We’d been prehistoric together, medieval, king and queen—now we were this. It was all part of the answer to his question What keeps us coming back? He wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him. And the details—the text messages—were just riddles from the universe. Clues. When I turned back to Kubelko the pregnant woman was gone.
RUTH-ANNE’S COUCH WAS WARM from her previous patient and she looked flushed and radiant.
“Good session?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You look happy.”
“Oh,” she said, dimming a little. “I just had my lunch hour—I took a catnap. How are you?”
So the heat of the couch was hers. I pressed the leather with my fingers and tried to think of how to begin.
“The thing you do with Dr. Broyard, that—what did you call it?”
“Roles? An adult game?”
“Right. Would you say that’s unusual?”
“Define unusual.”
“Well, how common would you say it is?”
“I’d say it’s more common than you would think.”
I told her what had happened—starting with what Michelle said and ending on the kitchen floor.
“And my globus is gone, still! I don’t know if you can tell”—I leaned forward and gulped—“but it’s much easier to swallow. I owe it all to you, Ruth-Anne.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a box.
Sometimes people say thank you before even opening the gift—thank you for thinking of me. Ruth-Anne didn’t do that; she glanced at her watch while brusquely pulling off the wrapping paper. It was a soy candle. Not the little kind, but a column in a glass jar with a wooden lid.
“It’s pomegranate currant,” I said.
She handed the candle back to me without smelling it.
“I don’t think this is for me.”
“It is! I just bought it.” I pointed down, indicating the shop on the ground floor.
She nodded, waiting.
“Who do you think it’s for?” I said, finally.
“Who do you think it’s for?”
“Besides you?”
She nodded by slowly shutting her eyes and opening them again. I held the candle nervously, like a hot potato.
“My parents?”
“Why your parents?”
“I don’t know. I just thought because this was therapy that might be the right answer.”
“Who might you want to give a candle to? Candle, flame, light . . . illumination . . .”
“. . . wick . . . wax . . . soy . . . ”
“Who? Think.”
“Clee?”
“That’s interesting. Why Clee?”
“That was right? Clee?”
THE WRAPPING PAPER WAS STILL good so I just retaped it. When Clee was in the bathroom I put it on her pillow but it rolled off with a bang; she came in just as I was reaching under the coffee table. I hadn’t wanted to hand it to her in person.
“Here.” I put the heavy cylinder in her hand. The fragrance was abundant and nothing like pomegranates or currants, neither of which is famous for its smell. It was so obviously a candle, the very dumbest present you could give a person. Clee undid the tape and she smelled it cautiously. She read the label. Finally she said, “Thank you.” I said, “You’re welcome.” It was horrible and there was no way to undo it.
I locked myself in the ironing room and wrote a long-overdue e-mail to the entire staff about recycling, overpopulation, and oil, then I toned it down a little, then I deleted it. The shower turned on. She was taking a shower. I called Jim and we talked about the warehouse staff.
“Kristof is lobbying for a basketball hoop,” he said.
“We tried that once and no one got any work done.” I hoped he’d keep pushing for the hoop so I could be really emphatic, but he dropped it. His wife was waiting for him; he had to go.
“How is Gina?”
But he really had to go.
It was dusk when I came out of the ironing room. She was sitting on the edge of the couch, knees wide apart. Her wet hair was combed back, a towel hung around her neck; a boxer is what she looked like. Her hands were interlaced in front of her and she was staring past them with a furrowed brow. The TV was off. She was waiting for me.
I’d never really sat in my armchair before. It wasn’t comfortable.
She ducked her head, acknowledging my arrival to the meeting, and made a sound in her throat as if she was pulling up phlegm.
“I may have given off the wrong . . .”—she searched for the word—“impression.”
She glanced at me, to make sure I was familiar with the word. I nodded.
“I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table.
“We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea.
“For me it’s a little more intense.” She was bouncing her knee unconsciously. “I guess I’m ‘misogynist’ or whatever.”
I’d never heard the word used like this, like an orientation.
“I’ll stop if you want,” she said, looking abstractly into the distance. At first I thought she meant talking, stop talking. She didn’t mean that.
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“What?”
“Stop.”