In Session (18)

The Lay Psychiatrist lays a client

“I’ve never stepped into that ring, it’s somebody else who lives in me. Personally, I don’t like to fight. I like to read self help books and share what I learn with others.” (The Lay Psychiatrist)

It’s not exactly raining, it’s more like we are in the embrace of wet clouds. If there are drops of rain, they are so insubstantial they blow past the window like spores from space.

I have been thinking more about the prescience of those old films, about zombies, and about the body snatchers. Now the capital has been overrun by zombies. Kevin McCarthy and others went to sleep on the job and never woke up. They were replicated in every detail except for the genitalia.

A Lincoln town car has parked in the street — there’s never any parking in this block — and unless I miss my guess, the lady emerging, with the assist of her chauffeur, is Robin Wise, married to Barton Fetters, the venture capitalist. He has money and she has style, which is the same as money but more liquid.

She married Fetters, but not in a traditional ceremony. She wrote her own, and it didn’t contain vows, but it did have stipulations. If he has her followed it’s grounds for divorce, for example. She kept her own name. The only thing she took that was his was his money.

“Lady Robin,” she said. “That’s what he called me. I wanted to punch him in the face.”

She’d come straight in and planted herself in the yellow chair after a quick glance at the room. “You know what that means don’t you?”

I said I wasn’t sure and she continued, “It means he’s afraid to fuck me and even more afraid somebody else might. Where does that leave me? I’ll tell you where it leaves me. Unfucked.”

“Well, there’s nothing unusual in that,” I said. “Women wear lipstick and powder and a short black crepe dress so they don’t remind him of his mother and make him impotent.”

“There’s grown men doing that too,” she said, “hoping you’ll let them in the car. Barton told me all about it when I didn’t believe that thing with Hugh Grant really happened.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Nearly thirty years ago, when I wasn’t yet thirty.”

She was off on the incident by a couple of years but she was close to sixty, and she looked ten years younger. “Barton was explaining to you about male prostitutes thirty years ago?”

“Barton always loved Hugh Grant, and he said the mistake a man makes is letting somebody in the car that’s bigger than he is. But he was younger, then, wearing a short skirt, and blonde wig, so Hugh let him in.”

“That was Divine Brown Hugh let into the car, not your husband.”

Her composure broke for a moment and I saw the anguish behind the cultivated mask. “I told you I can’t trust him,” she said.

“You have to tell me how I can help you, Mrs. Wise.”

She glanced at her watch. “We still have forty-five minutes,” she said.