“She shouldn’t,” I said.
“I know!” said James. “But thank you for saying it. I’m glad that we’re getting to know each other.”
* * *
—
Mid–session 7, Lisette brought her questionnaire to the window seat in which I was sitting, answering my own. “Excuse me,” she said, and eyed my legs, which lay across the cushion my ass wasn’t on. I drew them toward me and sat up straighter, to write with the legal pad against my knees. As Lisette sat down on the freed-up cushion and mirrored my position, one of her shoes tapped against one of mine. “Excuse me,” she said. A moment later, a heavier shoe tap—nearly a kick—sent my pencil scraping off the edge of the legal pad. “Excuse me,” she said, readjusting her feet, producing more contact, excuse-me-ing again.
I was happy. It was hopeless. A crybaby dramaqueen I’d been all along, but then again, though, maybe…Maybe so what? This was a chance to play real live footsie, a thing I’d never done, a thing I’d thought no one ever really did, “playing footsie” a phrase that up til that point I’d always assumed to be a mere euphemism, not an actual flirting behavior. And here I was doing it. Flirting. Or being flirted with.
I kicked Lisette’s shoe. “Excuse me,” I said.
She kicked my shoe harder. “Excuse me!” she said.
I unbent my legs a bit, tangling our feet up. I began to say, “Excuse me,” but only got to “Ex-” before Lisette had cut me off with an “Excuse me!” of her own, which, this time, came in advance of the offense: an outer-thigh charley horse.
“Jesus,” I said, massaging my thigh.
“Did I hurt you?” she said. “I didn’t mean to really hurt you. I’m sorry,” she said, and, leaning toward me, as if to offer comfort, toppled off the sill.
I jumped to the floor, to help her to her feet. Everyone was watching. How long had they been watching? For a while, I hoped.
She accepted the outreached hand I offered, but when I tried to hoist her, she didn’t cooperate: she went limp and dragged and, before I knew it, the hand I’d been pulling had slid out of its evening glove. She cradled the elbow of her pale, slender arm, the pale and slender fingers of which ended in nails the pale blue of robins’ eggs—cradled it as if, now that it was naked, its shoulder might otherwise slip from its socket.
I kind of shook the glove in the air between us.
“Put it back on me,” she said, “and don’t look.”
I got on my knees and did as she’d asked as quickly as I could, but it’s harder than it sounds to glove another person when you’re not allowed to look. It took at least a minute.
“Why are you here?” she whispered to me. The others, still watching—some just a couple of yards away—frowned from the strain of trying to listen in.
I said, “I’m here because you asked me to help you put your glove on.” I said so full-voiced, hoping this information would clarify, for anyone listening who might yet have thought otherwise, that I was gentle—a gentleman—not the kind of person who would knock a pretty girl to the floor from a window seat.
“Shh,” Lisette whispered. “And no. I mean here. Why are you here? In the study, I’m asking. How are you psychotic?”
“People tell me I hallucinate,” I whispered, sitting.
“But you don’t?”
“I might.”
“You don’t know.”
“I can’t. It’s impossible to know.”
“I think that’s the problem with everything, really. Too many things are impossible to know. Like my arm for example? The nasty scars all over my arm? You know how I got them?”
“What scars?”
“The big, red wormy scars,” she said. “It’s fine. You don’t have to pretend you didn’t see them. I’ve had them forever, and I’m even kind of proud of them. I was trying to be a hero is how I got them. I was stupid, but still. I was six years old, and Jenny Bigham, our neighbor, her father’s a drunk, and I was over there, playing Secretary upstairs with Jenny, in her room, when we started smelling smoke and we ran downstairs and saw that Mr. Bigham was passed out in the kitchen, like asleep on the counter, and his cigarette—and I don’t know how he did it, he must have kind of flinched when he was passing out or something—but the cigarette he’d been smoking had flown out of his hands and landed in the bunny cage a couple feet away, and the hay was on fire. It was scary, you know? The bunnies—there were two of them—were thumping and thumping in one corner of the cage that they’d peed or spilled water on or whatever, I don’t know, it was wet, and not on fire yet, this one small corner that was getting smaller as the fire advanced, and they were huddled together, the three of them, thumping their back legs, and looking at Jenny, and then at me, like they were trying to tell her, ‘There’s a fire, there’s a fire! Get out! Save yourself!’ but since Jenny was way more worried about her father, about trying to wake him, she wasn’t looking at the bunnies, she was poking at her father, saying, ‘Daddy! Wake up! Daddy! Daddy!’ and so they looked at me, thumping, like they were thumping for me so I would tell Jenny there was a fire and she had to get out. I mean, that’s probably not really what the bunnies were thinking at all, but that’s how it seemed at the time. Anyway, I was afraid, as you can probably imagine, and I didn’t want those bunnies to burn—it wasn’t right—and so I opened the cage, which was metal, and which opened from the top, and reached in with both arms, through the flames, and pulled two of the bunnies out, and once I saw that they weren’t on fire, I kind of threw them toward the hallway, and they ran away. I turned back around to try to save the third one, but that’s when the blisters on my hands started popping and I noticed that the arms of my sweater were on fire, and I swooned. I passed out. A few minutes later, I woke up on the floor and the fire was out and the third bunny was fine because Mr. Bigham had finally woken up and he did what I was too stupid to do, or too panicked to do, which was he filled a pot with water and threw the water onto me and onto the flames in the cage. My arms were ruined, and I knew I’d been stupid, but I learned that day that I wasn’t a coward, and I knew my heart was in the right place. So you don’t have to pretend like my scars aren’t ugly.”
“I’m not pretending, though,” I said. “I didn’t even notice them.”
“You couldn’t have,” Lisette said. “There aren’t any scars. I made that all up to see what you’d say. I’m glad you stuck to your story.”
“I don’t get it.”