II

Going Along Together
by Frank Albrecht
Chapter 2

    Silence. Barbara motionless, her back to the room. Wolfe sitting silent on the low table, leaning toward her, seething: I'm stupid she's too touchy it's her fault no my fault should I speak wait get up walk around give her some space fall on my knees and beg this is the end it's all over she's never forgive me how could I have said something so stupid?
    "I’m sorry," he said after a time. "I didn’t mean it like that. I was just repeating something I heard."
    His words fell into emptiness.

    "I know you’re really sick," he said finally. "I saw that before. You know I did."
    Her back moved slowly up and down with her breathing. Otherwise she was still. He sat remembering

    Barbara had looked more businesslike than tempting the first time Wolfe saw her—a brisk female stranger with earnest eyes and brown bangs, her wavy hair cut short of her shoulders. She wore a dark, fitted suit whose severity was reinforced by frills at the neck and wrists of her white blouse. Her skirt came below the knees, her hose was sheer, her heels medium. She had a handbag slung over her shoulder and carried bottle of Perrier Water. A small woman with a trim but unspectacular figure, she gave him a firm handshake, a direct gaze, and then sat down on the edge of the cushion in the exact middle of the sofa, carefully placing her purse on the cushion to her left and the bottle of water on the floor near her right foot. During the session she would occasionally lean forward, pick up the bottle, loosen the cap, take a sip, refasten the cap, and replace the bottle on the floor, all without interrupting the flow of her talking and listening.
Hardly enough of the cushion under her buttocks to keep her from slipping to the floor, her body taut, ready to flee, her eyes, large, brown and unblinking, looked huge behind her the big lenses of her hornshelled glasses.
    "My doctor thinks I must be depressed," she had begun.
    About two years before he first saw her, she explained, she had had what seemed an ordinary flu. She ignored it and followed her usual schedule. But day followed day, weeks turn into months, and she continued to feel tired, weak, and "sick" in a way that she couldn’t clearly define. "My body feels the way it does if I have a really bad cold," she said, "but without the cold." She often had a low fever, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, felt foggy in the head, or was so dizzy she had to lean on walls or railings to keep from falling. Some days she didn’t go to work because she couldn’t think straight. Other days she stayed home because she knew she was too weak or dizzy to make it through the day. She also wasn’t having much fun. She and her husband no longer went out much, nor did she often do anything by herself or with friends. She felt so worn out from doing her job and maintaining her home that she had nothing left for leisure activities. "At my best I’m only about 60% myself," she explained. "When I’m really me I go and go, but since I have this thing I just have to push through without having a lot in me to push with. But Dr. Farrar thinks there’s nothing wrong with me, except maybe depression."
    "What do you think?" Wolfe had asked.
    She paused reflectively. "I am distressed," she said. "That’s about my son, and it’s pretty bad. I can’t even think about it. But that’s not what’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with me is that I am ill, even if my doctor doesn’t believe it."
    "I can’t do anything based on what your doctor believes or disbelieves," Wolfe had said. "And I don’t know anything about physical illness. You’re here. What do you want to work on?"
    She thought a moment. Her eyes left him, went out of focus, drifted downward and to the right. He enjoyed watching her, he noticed. In spite of her air of a bird about to take flight, she seemed harmonious. Tone of voice, posture, way of moving, gaze, all seemed to fit together. Her various little bits of mind, body and soul seemed unusually concordant.

    After a moment she looked back at him. "We might as well talk about Jimmy, my son, " she said, and her eyes filled with tears.
Jimmy was in prison for first degree murder, having stabbed a man during a fight. What made it first degree was that he had threatened the man the day before. Barbara felt it was her fault this had happened, even though Jimmy had been living with his father in California at the time. She had raised him badly, she felt, allowing him to be exposed to his father’s violence, then tried to bring him up on her own while she worked and went to school. "I should have stayed home," she said. Only at 18 had he gone to live with his father. "He was formed by then," she told Wolfe, "I’d already done it to him."
    This harsh judgment came out of a complex history. The first of four children, Barbara had been born near Elkins, West Virginia, right at the end of World War Two, August 31, 1945. Her father, Elmer Hutchison, had recently been drafted into the Army but soon returned and became a butcher, like his father. Her mother, Nan, was fresh out of high school but eventually became, like her own mother, a registered nurse. When Barbara was five Elmer’s National Guard unit was called to service in the Korean War. He came home a year later with part of his brain blown off and a steel plate substituting for some of his skull.
    Formerly a peaceable man, Barbara’s father’s behavior was now violent, unpredictable, and bizarre, especially when he was drinking. "He drank as much as he could, whenever he could," Barbara said. He was often committed to the nearby state hospital. "But they never kept him long. They’d sober him up and get him on medicine that was supposed to keep him calmed down. Then they’d let him go. He’d get back home, flush the medicine, and look for a bottle."
Elmer Hutchison spent his disability check on drink, buying heavily for his friends and for the various women he took to a local motel. At home he often had violent rages, destroying furniture and crockery, ripping doors off hinges, and attacking Barbara’s mother, usually with his fists, sometimes with an ax handle. At other times he sat for hours in brooding silence. During these periods no one dared make a sound anywhere near him, nor speak above a whisper. "If you did," she told Wolfe "he’d throw something at you. Anything. Bottle of beer, plate, knife, fork, anything he had. Sometimes he’d sit with the Bible and he’d throw that. And he threw hard. He’d hurt you." Her nose was crooked because of this, broken when he’d thrown a block of oak wood he was whittling. Another time he threw a cup of coffee at her. "It burned my face, even my eyelids. But Mama couldn’t take me to the hospital because they’d call the social services an’ I’d be taken away. So I had to stay home from school till I looked all right."
At the end of these brooding periods Barbara’s father sometimes took off all his clothes and went out walking in the neighborhood. This would bring the deputy sheriffs—three or four of them, because they would have to subdue him and take him to the hospital.
    Nan Hutchison worked double shifts at the same state hospital to which her husband was so often committed. Barbara took care of the house and the younger children. Eager to please, she kept busy every second, trying to make the house perfect and to keep everybody happy. Away from home she became morbidly timid. "I was okay in first and second grade," she told me. "But after Daddy came home I got afraid of everything." She had crooked teeth, rummage sale clothes, no friends, and was silent and withdrawn in her classes. She sat in the back row, was never anyone’s first pick for teams or projects, and reached 9th grade only because her school promoted everyone no matter what work they did or didn’t do.
    Her first husband, George, was the only boy who had so much as held her hand. When she got pregnant her mother opposed the marriage. "George’s family are nothing but hillbillies," she told her daughter. "Most of them don’t wash from one year to the next." Barbara knew that this was true because in fourth grade she’d had to sit next to one of her fiancé’s cousins and she remembered his smell and that his clothing was usually stiff with dirt. Nam Hutchison also told her daughter that she’d seen too many of that family sent to the state hospital for treatment of alcoholism and "other things." Barbara knew this was true too. The whole clan was notorious for filthy language and drunken brawls. Cracked as he was, even Barbara’s father avoided them.
    But her mother could not prevail. George himself was clean enough, he hadn’t been arrested for anything as an adult, had an honorable discharge from the Army, had some skill as a bricklayer, and was ready to move to a big city and make his fortune. "I knew he wasn’t going to do well," Barbara told Wolfe, "even if I didn’t admit it, even to myself. I let him have sex with me so I’d get pregnant and have to leave home. I didn’t understand that then but that’s what it was."
    On the wedding night George beat her up because she was reluctant to do fellatio.
    Her husband’s real reason for moving to Baltimore, it seemed to Barbara in the year after her baby was born, was so every payday he could get drunk while watching the strippers on the Block. By now he was putting too much of his money into drink to provide adequately for his family, so Barbara left her infant with a neighbor and got a job in fast food. When the boy was old enough to go to school she increased her hours, became an assistant manager, began to make what was to her good money. To George this meant he could work less and drink more. He didn’t even mind her working weekends. He’d drink, spend time with other women, and beat her when she came home.
    Getting rid of George cost Barbara a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw, a concussion, weeks of hiding in a battered woman’s shelter, and a kidnapping (George was picked up with their son two weeks later in West Virginia). For months she had to keep a CB radio in her car so she could call the police when George tried to follow her home from work. Things didn’t get better for her until she let George off paying child support in return for his promise to stay away from her. Even after that he sometimes shadowed her. Finally he moved to California and for the first time she felt secure.
    Jimmy started getting in trouble when he was five—setting fires, throwing rocks at neighborhood cats, hitting another boy with a bat. For years Barbara took him to a mental health clinic. "That never did him any good that I could see," she said. "But it helped me a lot." By watching the female counselors she learned how to dress, fix her hair, and do her face. Her relationship with a male counselor helped her understand that not all men were like her husband and her father. Even her father wasn’t really like her father, she realized, recalling her memories of him as a happy peaceful man before he had been called away to war. She began to see that she came from a normal family that had been traumatized, rather than from one that had never been able to function properly. Seeing her family differently enabled her to see herself differently too, as a person with a capacity, nurtured in early childhood, for health and happiness. Increasingly she rooted her new, grown-up identify in the feelings in which she had lived her first seven years, before her father had returned so terribly changed.
    The mental health clinic waiting room also was therapeutic. She met women there who told her how to get GED classes, where to find an orthodontist who would cut her a deal, how to make contact with a battered spouse program, and that she was not alone in her suffering. Overall, the clinic experience taught her that she did not have to live as she did, in pain, fear and humiliation. By the time she came to Wolfe, when she was thirty-nine, she had a Bachelor’s degree in accounting, a Master’s in business administration, was manager of an accounting unit for a large defense contractor, owned her own home and a vacation house in Ocean City as well, and was married to a non-drinking steelworker whom she’d met on the job.
    "You don’t seem like an accountant sort of person," Wolfe said to her once.
    "I’m not," she replied. "I’m good with numbers because they don’t mean anything to me, so my feelings don’t get in the way."
    "No tears over the ruined Trial Balance?" he asked, amused.

    "I never cried much about anything until you got hold of me."
    In that first session with him she cried every minute she talked about Jimmy. Not weeping, a gentle seepage of tears. Face screwed up into ugly grimaces, she sobbed. She gasped for breath. Wheezing, her whole body shuddering, expelling her words one or two at a time, or getting out only parts of words between forced breaths as sudden and uncontrolled as hiccups, she tried to tell Wolfe about her son’s life, and her own. Mascara ran ugly black rivers down her cheeks and dripped gray splotches from her chin onto the fluffy frills of her white blouse. Her glasses fogged up from the moisture and she took them off and set them on the couch beside her.
    When her fifty minutes were up she was still crying freely so Wolfe uncrossed his legs and leaned forward a little. She took the cue, stopped crying, blotted her eyes with tissue from the coffee table, put on her glasses, handed him a check she had written in advance, and made another appointment.
    "Hasn’t cried enough," Wolfe wrote in his notebook.
    His one attempt to help her during that first session had been to offer a bit of mild consolation. "Sometimes people feel better after they cry real hard over something," he told her.
    She peered at him, bleary, bloodshot eyes, red nose, soiled cheeks. She could have been a drunk trying to sober up after a weeklong bender.

    "The way this illness works," she responded, "I’ll be lucky if I can get out of bed tomorrow, after an hour like this."
    "This illness?" The one the doctor didn’t believe in? Wolfe waited for her to say more but she went right back to talking about her son. He thought no more about it, so no bells rang in his head when she cancelled her next appointment. He thought she'd decided not to return, that couldn't face so much pain.
    But she rescheduled and turned up looking just as she had before.
"I’m sorry about last week," she told him. "The time before really wore me out. I was so tired! But I wouldn’t give in to it. I just pushed myself, I kept going. And then it was hot over the weekend—that always makes it worse. So I crashed. I just couldn’t go anymore. I had to spend a couple of days in bed."
    "You got more tired after the last session?" he asked, puzzled.
"Oh, yeah, for days. It was awful!"
    "Usually people feel better after they get things out like that."
    "Oh, I did! I still do. But it wore me out."
    To Wolfe that seemed strange. Releasing pain frees energy. It puts a new spring in people’s step. They bounce. He couldn’t imagine an illness being worse after such an experience.
    "Heat has something to do with it?" he asked. That didn’t compute either.
    "You don’t understand," she told him. "You think I’m tired because I’m neurotic or something. Well, I am neurotic, I know that! But I’m not tired because of that. I’m tired because I’m sick."
    The next day Wolfe talked to Brad Farrar, her doctor, learning that she had "post-viral fatigue" or "chronic Epstein Barr syndrome." "Some people say that’s a real illness," the doctor explained, "maybe it’s a chronic mononucleosis, something like that." But Farrar didn’t think that himself. It was an emotional problem, he said. "She’s just worn herself out. What’s wrong with her is nervous exhaustion and depression."
    "She says heat makes it worse," Wolfe said, still rather puzzled.
    "Yeah, she tells me that too," the doctor said. "Patients like her come up with the damnedest things. But the point is, it’s in their heads."
    Barbara cried for two more sessions, always wearing her dark suits and frilly blouses, always perched on the edge of the central cushion, always rejecting any consolation or redirection he had to offer. There was no insight, no movement, just tearful rumination and self-blame. The only change was that she started wearing waterproof mascara. But she wouldn’t give up. "Before I came here," she told him, her chest heaving, her cheeks and chin shiny with tears, "I don’t think he cried ten times in my whole life."
    "It’s a process," he said. "You have to go through it."
    Wolfe still found her harmonious. And he admired her for sticking to something that hurt her so much.
    The forth session she came and sat down on one end of the sofa, nearer to him than before—a dramatic change! Not only that, she sat back on the cushions rather than on their edge. She did not slouch but she did let her spine touch the backrest. She then crossed her legs (also a first) and said, "I’m not going to cry today."
    "Why not?" he asked.
    She stared at him, wide eyes behind the big glasses. "I’m sick of being a baby about this. I want to get over it."
    "All right," he said.
    "Maybe I will cry," she said. "But not much. Not like I did."

    "What was that about," he asked her, "that particular kind of crying?"
    As she focused her mind on that question her brown eyes sharpened into an intense stare into space and she clamped her front teeth onto her lower lip, making her look as if she had a monumental overbite. The contrast of the odd expression on her face with her elegant clothing and correct posture made her look comical to him. She seemed quaintly, endearingly peculiar. He smiled. She noticed.
    "What’s funny?" she asked.
    He refused her question by shaking my head. "Talk about the crying," he said, trying to redirect her.
    "People think it’s funny I chew on my lip," she said. "But it helps me." She did it again. He kept a straight face. She was charming, he realized—quietly direct, personable, modest, unconcerned that she might look foolish, and very attractive. Her erect posture, careful dress, and almost elaborately correct diction might have made her seem pompous, stiff, or cold. Somehow instead they combined with her slight figure and small stature, and with the warmth of her forthright gaze, to make her efficient without seeming officious, reserved without appearing aloof, and intelligent without an impression of calculation. He found her, he realized in that moment, enormously refreshing.
    He was silent as she continued to chew on her lip. Finally she said, "I feel the same way now as he did last week when I was crying. But I’ve gotten some control over it, somehow."
    "That’s what you want to work on, more control of that feeling?" he asked her.

    "I feel so bad about Jimmy," she answered. "It’s there, all the time, hurting my heart."
    "You want to stop caring about him?" he asked.
    She narrowed her eyes, looked coldly at him. "He’ll be locked up at least twenty more years," she said. "I can’t do anything about that, but every day I feel like it’s my fault he’s still there. As if I could get him out."
    "What about the illness?" he asked. "That’s what your doctor sent you here for, isn’t it?"
    She gave him a carefully expressionless look, the kind people put on during card games or tricky business deals. "He thinks I can talk it away," she told me. "I don’t agree with him. I think it’s physical. But if something you can do will help, I’ll take it."
    When Barbara left that day he smiled warmly at her, enjoying a sense of her as wonderfully harmonious, as if she were a sweet melody sweeping along within a satisfying sequence of chords.
A feeling like that should have scared him but it was too pleasant, it lulled him, and for that moment he didn’t look at it critically. But he did develop an uneasy sense, not of the reality—which was that he was attracted to Barbara—but of a self-deception, that he was not attracted to her but might be, sometime in the future, or that he could, just could, maybe someday, have a sexual feeling for her. This is why he began to record their talks. Running the tape gave him he had a sense of performing in front of an invisible audience. It kept him from feeling he was really alone with her, which in turn motivated him to hide those impulses he was sure he didn’t have, but which nonetheless he feared.
    He also decided it was time to try some real therapy with her.
She settled comfortably for her next visit, crossing her legs and taking her ease by allowing her back to touch the couch cushion behind her. He explained he was using the tape "for training purposes." She didn’t mind.
    "You’re getting nowhere talking about Jimmy," he told her. "So let’s talk about how your life is now."
    She didn’t see the point.
    "I do have some problems in my life now," she explained, "I don’t mean I don’t. But I can handle that stuff. It’s the past that I can’t deal with, how I made such a mess of my son."
    He spoke more coldly than he would have had he not been on the way to loving her. "You’ve thought out your problems with your son a thousand times. Has it helped you get over how you feel about them?"
    "No, but…"
    "So doing that some more won’t help," he interrupted. "Let’s talk about the problems in your life now."
    "Well… I don’t see…."
    "I am the therapist," Wolfe interrupted again. "I can see the point. You don’t need to see it too, for right now. You need to tell me about the problems in your life now."
    Barbara uncrossed her legs and edged forward, coming closer to her old way of perching on the edge of the cushion. One leg jittered rapidly.
    "It’s just stupid stuff," she said in a tightened voice. "Besides feeling sick all the time, I mean. Ralph mostly ignores me. He sits around watching sports and if I try to talk with him he’s still watching. Sometimes he wants sex when I don’t. Stuff like that."
    "You can handle that stuff, you said."

    "Yes, of course I can!"
    "How do you handle it?"
    "Well, I don’t know. What do you mean?"
    "How? What to you do to handle it?"
    She was puzzled. "I’ve never thought about that—what I do," she said. "I just do it."

    "Do what? Describe it. What do you do? He’s watching TV and won’t talk to you. What do you do?"
    "I do what I have to," she responded, seeming genuinely puzzled—perhaps as much by his impatience with her as with her inability to answer his questions.
    They went over about ten little stressors that she could handle but couldn’t tell how. She was now all the way to the edge of her seat and breathing somewhat rapidly. He leaned forward, pressing on her physically with his posture. Finally he said to her, "What do you feel, inside you, right now?"
    "Now?" she asked.
    "Right this second."
    "Pissed off!"
    "At what?"
    "At you!"
    Good! he thought. "Why?" He said.
    In the therapeutic script Wolfe was following, Barbara’s anger was a recreation of the feelings she had had toward her first husband when he was abusing her. These in their turn would be based on her earlier feelings toward her abusive father. Seeing how she carried these same feelings forward into situation after situation would teach her something about how she "handled" things.
    But Barbara didn’t follow the script.
    "You lean forward," she responded in an angry tone and with a hard look. "You pepper me with questions, you won’t give me to time think about them so he can make a sensible answer, then you act like my answers show how stupid I am!" Suddenly her face softened, changed from angry to interested—or perhaps amused! A hint of a smile touched the corners of her lips. "You’re acting like a little boy who likes a girl so he hits her on the head with his book. That’s it, isn’t it? You like me."
    Wolfe had a sharp turning in his stomach and a sudden vivid imagine of Sally, freckle-faced with long braids and a gap between her front teeth. In second grade he’d alternated between carrying Sally’s books and hitting her with his own.
    But he gazed mildly at Barbara, trying to keep his face from showing anything beyond bland attention to her reactions.
Suddenly she made a little "Ummph" sound and sat back on the couch, pulling her legs up beside her, turning her body so her shoulder was to the back cushion. "Shit!" she said. "I got it."
As she pulled into this posture her skirt rode well up her thigh. Wolfe the person found that glimpse fascinating just as Wolfe the therapist struggled not to look. To return himself to duty he stared at the tape recorder.
    "You got what?" he asked.
    But she was crying. Leaning an elbow on the overstuffed arm, leaning her forehead on her hand, staring downward, crying.
"Shit!" she said again. She straightened, slid forward on the couch, snapped a tissue from the box on the table, dabbed her eyes, pulled her skirt down. "I don’t do it with you," she said.
    Unnh?" he muttered, struggling against his instant thought of what can be meant by the word "it."
    "With you I don’t handle things the way I usually do. Usually I do it by making sure whatever is going to happen does happen, so I can feel in control." Wolfe looked at her, not sure he understood. "Like," she went on, "George would hit me if I did certain things or said certain things. So if I was worried about what he was going to do next, but not sure about it, I’d do one of those things so he would bash me."
    "You’d make sure he would hit you?"
    "Yeah. If he didn’t beat me I wouldn’t be able to predict what he’d do and I’d be scared."
    "Being beaten is better than being scared?"

    "If I know something’s going to happen, and it does, then it doesn’t hurt. It’s like it doesn’t really exist. I don’t feel it."
This should have told him she probably had been molested. But he was so muddled by his feelings about how melodious, beautiful and harmonious she was, not to mention what a fine shape her legs had and how far up her thigh he’s seen, and so busy defending himself against noticing he had these feelings, that he didn’t put it together.
    Once he actually asked her if she’d ever been molested. "I don’t remember that," she said. He missed that too.
"But I didn’t do that with you," Barbara went on. "You were bullying me, I felt abused. You wanted me to get all upset, I think, get into a rage or something, so I’d blurt out some secret I didn’t even think I knew. And maybe I would have—but instead I looked at you and felt something for you. I like you, too. So I didn’t do my usual. That’s really interesting, don’t you think?"
    "Hmm," he said, appalled by her directness.
    "Why ‘hmm?" she asked him. "Why not say what you think?"
    "Let’s talk about one simple part of this," he said. As these words came out he realized they conceded what he wanted to hide, that he did in fact "like" her. But he plunged on, away from danger. "With your current husband," he said. "How do you get him to do what you think he’s going to do anyway?"
    "He’s going to ignore me and watch television," she said, "so I read the sports page and the TV Guide and mention things to him I know he’ll want to watch. I even turn the damn thing on for him. In other ways too. Like if I can see he wants sex but I don’t, I seduce him. Because then I won’t have to be scared he’ll want me, and when I do it I won’t have to feel it!"
    Suddenly her eyes again filled with tears.
    "I never felt like this," she said. "This hurts and I’m crying. But I feel good too. This is something special!" She paused and stared at him with astonishment. "You are really something special, for me." she added.
    "Time’s up," he said, glancing with relief at the clock.
    She gave him a look that meant she saw through him. And he knew she had. But she went away quietly and he soon forgot he had noticed.
    She canceled the next session. Too sick, she said.
    The next week he asked her: "Could it be you resist getting better—so every time you take a step forward it knocks you down physically?"
    "It’s not like that," she said. "It’s anything I put energy into—washing windows, doing the taxes, going out to dinner. It’s just the energy."
    "Energy?" he asked.
    "The energy it takes to do things. It’s like I’m low income or something—for energy, I mean—so I have to stay within a strict budget. If I do extra one day I have to borrow the energy from the days ahead, and then I have to pay for it by not being able to do anything those days."
    He furrowed his brow. "You mean one hour of doing windows or having a special dinner can put you out just as much as an hour of emotion?" She nodded. "That doesn’t make any sense," he protested.
She shrugged. "I know some other people who have this same thing and they can’t find anybody that understands it either. People who don’t have it can’t seem to get it. But when you run up against it yourself it’s as real as a brick wall."
    She now had the habit of slipping her pumps off when she sat down, doing the session in stocking feet. One day she took the shoes off and then, as she sat talking to hih, she pulled one of her legs up onto the onto the couch so that it lay beside her, folded backward with the stockinged toe pointing away from her and her heel touching her posterior. But her knees were still together and her other leg was in a normal position, the foot solidly on the floor. This looked impossible.
    She saw him looking at her leg. "I’m double-jointed," she explained. She smiled, charmingly, and there was a sudden gaiety to her voice. He caught himself thinking the dimple in her chin was adorable!
    He glanced at the tape machine, got his therapy mask back on, and led her through a tough session. Her agony over her son seemed to arise from an unconscious fear that she had "handled" his problems by making sure he would do the horrible things she feared he would.
"I think I’m going to be sick every week," she said at the end of that hour.
    "You should get better," he told her as they finished. "No matter what this mysterious illness is, you should get more energy from accepting your past failures, releasing old pains, and moving on to more mature ways of handling conflicts."
    "I don’t think it will work that way," she said. "But fine, if it does." She pulled her pre-written check from a pocket and put it on the table, as always.
    Over the next weeks she changed rapidly— but contrary to Wolfe’s prediction her tiredness did not improve.
    Barbara’s rapidly improving mental health posed Wolfe three problems. One was that her blossoming made her even more attractive to him. A second was that her cheerful mood and relative freedom from neurosis made it difficult for him to find excuses for using with her the cold, hard-nosed manner that was his protection from noticing how he felt about her. Finally, as she became less fixated on her son she talked more about the emptiness of her marriage—which interfered with his desire to think of her as unavailable.
    Barbara’s husband, Ralph, seemed to value her for her services as a housekeeper and entertainer, and as a source of physical satisfaction, without retaining much interest in her as a person. In fact he had little interest in anything. He came from a large family with whom he was appropriate but distant. He had some buddies, men he’d gone to school with, but he rarely saw them or did anything with them. He worked and he carried out what he conceived to be a man’s responsibilities around the house, and there he stopped. Kindly without being thoughtful, Ralph sat passively, incurious, watching life go by. Or not even watching life. Watching television.
    In their courtship Ralph had briefly come out of his isolation, revealing himself as vulnerable, of tender feelings, a huge man possessed of a large bass voice yet within himself shy, confused by his many currents of emotion, socially awkward, a delicate flower trapped in the misleadingly macho body of an oversized steelworker. Seeing him so, Barbara had felt close to him. Once married, however, lacking now the impetus of freshly found sexual desire and the lovely, transforming effects of exploring a new person, he had retreated into himself. She could no longer bring him much out of himself because she was no longer new and unknown to him--and because she lacked the energy.
    "That’s not his fault," Barbara told Wolfe. "He can’t help it, poor man."
    She liked him, still loved him. He treated her well. They could talk about anything but feelings. They shared many viewpoints. She would stay with him, no reason not to. But she felt she was missing a lot.
    "What’s hard in bed is that he doesn’t want me anymore. He wants the body that happens to be there. I could hire a substitute, I don’t think he’d notice." She got her most impish grin. "Maybe I will," she said. "I’ll sleep on the couch and send in a ringer. Maybe I could go down on the Block and find one—those girls will do anything, won’t they?"
    "A lot of it’s because of my illness," she said another time. "I don’t have much of an itch for that anymore. I never did have it with George. I was too scared of him. I didn’t even know, back then, what it was to want somebody physically. I’d never felt it. I never felt anything at all down there except if I needed to pee or had an infection. But after I was separated… boy, what a surprise! It scared hell out of me for a while! But then I got to like it and if I didn’t have somebody I’d want to masturbate, though that doesn’t seem very proper." She sharpened her gaze on Wolfe. "Do you masturbate?" she asked him.
    He made a face and rolled his eyes at the ceiling.
    "Well, why shouldn’t I ask? And why shouldn’t you answer? Aren’t you supposed to be a role model or something?"
    She constantly found ways to penetrate his therapeutic persona.
    "You’re married, aren’t you?" she asked him once.
    "Yes," he said. He kept his personal life away from clients but he’d admit to basic biographical stuff. She followed up by saying:
    "Happily?"
    "That’s none of your business," he told her.
    She wasn’t even slightly put off. "I think you are not," she said.
    He wondered why she thought that but said nothing.
    "Look at this office!" she went on, gazing around.
    Wolfe loved his office! The wall covered with books, for instance. He had made the shelves himself and they held not only a standard array of professional works, psychology journals, research monographs, and psychotherapy classics, but also poetry, history, travel, sailing. He even had some of his father’s books, including his West Point yearbook that described how girls had loved this young Kaydet's "beautiful eyelashes." These books represented his very soul! So did the desk, which was not simply a convenient surface but a handmade maple refectory table purchased by his maternal grandmother in 1927 from the man who made it in the hills up above Ashville, North Carolina. She had used it as the head table in the dining room of her country inn, Mill Farm, sitting at it in autocratic command of family, guests and servants. Now it served her grandson, modestly as a desk, monumentally as a memento. There were also the overstuffed sofa with the big, floral pattern he’d chosen himself, the creaky almost-antique rockers, a Chippendale straight chair from a different grandparent, the clutter of his papers, his wooden file cabinet, and a couple of watercolors—one of plains Indians, "The Scouting Party" it was called, one of an old working sailboat, an oyster dredge, rounding Bloody Point Light in a squall. Last but not least, one of his mother’s fine but battered oriental rugs covered most of the commercial carpet. It was a perfect office, a wonderful office—and here was this woman criticizing it!
    "What’s wrong with this office?" he demanded.
    "Nothing," Barbara said. "It’s fine. But it’s all you. Whoever your wife is, she’s not here. You’ve kept her out."
    He was caught. Ann hardly ever set foot in this place, nor did he want her to. Chaos came with her, stuck to whatever she touched. She left a trail of it behind her like King Midas leaving a trail of gold. Her presence would have destroyed the solitary serenity he had built in his work.
    He looked at Barbara, tried to compose a reasonable response. But she went right on, cheerfully. "You won’t tell me," she tossed off. "None of my business, none of my business! At least you didn’t roll your eyes this time" she laughed gaily. "But you’re just a person like anybody else. And I know the answer to my question anyway. I can see it in you, not just in the office."
    He felt himself redden. "I love my wife," he told Barbara firmly. That was true. He had loved her almost from the moment they met, and he still loved her.
    But that was so much the wrong answer! Barbara had penetrated his defenses, getting him to reveal something exceptionally private in his own life. The recorder took it down, mercilessly. He stared at it, hoping for guidance.
    "Of course you love her," Barbara said. "But that’s not the point, is it?"
    He finally remembered what he should have said earlier.
    "Let’s talk about you," he said.
    She was getting sexier to him. Dimple, lips, eyes, legs, taut body, double joints, hands, hair, even her stocking-covered feet. Whatever part of her he looked at looked good. He detached himself, thanked God for the tape recorder and also for her high necklines and long hemlines.
    Maybe she was reading his mind!
    One day he told her that her invariable behavior with his check was an example of her need to make things predictable.
    "Oh, really?" she said. Leering at him like a joyful hunter ready to pop off the unsuspecting deer, her face filled with glee, she took the check from her pocket and tore it into pieces, which she threw up into the air so that they settled back down on her and the couch like confetti. "So what do you think about that, Dr. Smart Guy?" she asked him.
    "Wow!" he said.
    "It’s a lot easier," she lectured, "to do things in the same way every time you do them. You make fewer mistakes and you can get stuff done faster with less effort."
    "Defenses that work are good defenses," he answered, rather lamely.
    "Next week," she said in a malicious tone, "I’m going to show you a brand new defense!" With that she got up and marched out without another word or a backward glance. He had to pick up the shreds of her check himself.
    The next week she wore a dress, a silky green short-skirted, scoop-necked chemise with a brocade vest whose browns picked up the color of her eyes.
    "I am never going to the office like this again," she told him as she sat down and pulled her legs up under her, giving him an ample display of thigh as she did so. She looked wonderful!
    "Responses too unpredictable?" he managed to say with his suddenly dry mouth.
    She made a face at him. "You still think I don’t understand these things," she said. "But the fuss people at work made when they saw me. You’d think they’d never seen a dress before!"
    What she found really difficult was that four people, two men and two women, had told her how pretty she was.
    "You are pretty," he told her.
    "I know you think I am," she said. "But you’re prejudiced."
    He felt himself redden. She took so much for granted. But she was right!
    "And the other problem was," she continued, "I couldn’t lean over—with this neckline. So there I was trying to show somebody something on a printout and I had to squat, bending my knees so I didn’t have to lean over them. And it was a female! It was stupid!"
    "Didn’t you ever wear anything but a high neck?" he asked.
    "George put me in low cut stuff. He’d take me to a store and have me model things. He’d pick what he wanted and make me wear it. But then he’d get mad at me if a guy looked at me."
    "Now that I have this dress," she said, "I’m going to wear it. But I’ve got to get used to it. I’m going to lean forward and let you look. I want you to stare, okay?"
    He knew she was laughing at him, flirting, provoking him on purpose. But how could he refuse? "My pleasure," he murmured.
She leaned forward, blushing, revealing the top of the cups of her no-nonsense white bra, the reddening flesh between them, and the lacy top of a slip. She had her head up, watching him as he peered down her front. He was thinking that looking down a woman’s neckline is a lot more fun when you don’t have permission. Though he was happy to do it anyway!
    She straightened. "How was that?" she asked.
    "It was fine," he said. "Was it good for you too?
    They both giggled. But to Wolfe this had gone too far. It was time to end it.
    "You have just demonstrated," he told her, "that you are well now." He suggested she not return.
    "I'm as sick as ever" she exclaimed, mocking him. "Weren't you doing to cure that?"
    "You're not sick in your head," he told her. "This illness thing you have, I don’t know what it is, but it certainly isn’t anything to do with your mental health."
    "Finally," she said, "truth!"
    "Do therapists and their clients ever become friends, later?" she asked him a moment later.
    "Sometimes," he said. "A long time after." She bit her lip with her upper teeth but said nothing. He couldn’t look at her. She left him a pre-written check for two sessions—that one and the torn check one. He put the tape of her last session on the shelf with the others. He had kept them all, instead of recording over them as I usually did.
That’s the end of it, he thought.
    For weeks he had images of her in his head—her brown eyes and level gaze, her chest when she leaned forward, the glimpses he’d had of her thigh as she moved her legs, her silence when she had nothing to say, her erect posture, her way of moving that was so harmonious and well-balanced. Even her open-eyed way of crying seemed attractive to him!
    "Now that’s really stupid!" he told himself.
    Also stupid, it seemed to Wolfe, was seeing her as beautiful. "Beautiful, with that nose!" he said to himself. But rational thought didn’t help. The memories and fantasies faded but he remained besotted, hopelessly in love

    But he did know, for sure, that she was really sick, not just in her head.

This is the second of the sequence of three chapters posted here. A separate chapter, number 8, in which Wolfe meets a teenager with CFS, is also posted.
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