THE PSYCHOLOGIST’S OFFICE was a pleasant walk from Ann’s apartment. Nobody walked, but Ann decided to save gas. Besides, her engine was knocking. As she set out, she dropped off her rent check with the landlady and as usual peered into the dim, forbidding house. The overhead trapeze bar was an odd touch, for Jingles had a dumpy, middle-aged body, not the svelte form of an acrobat. Ann wondered if Pixie had only imagined Jingles doing flips in the parlor. After leaving, Ann noticed the landlady acrobat peering out the window at her from behind her heavy, velvet-roped drapery.
The psychologist, a natty dresser in a blue blazer, wanted to be called by his first name, Frank.
“Everybody’s talking about relationships,” Ann said, getting straight to the point. “That and their identity crises.”
“Do you have an identity crisis?”
“I don’t know.” She confessed the envy she felt when she saw young people in pairs flirting and holding hands. All her life, she had been told that a woman had to trap a man. Her dentist had called lipstick “man-bait.” What was she doing wrong? How could she grab hold of a boy and make him care about her?
Frank curled his fists and flexed his fingers.
“You’ve come to the right place,” he said. “We can fix your problem.”
“And can you fix my car?”
His little chuckle made her relax. She couldn’t have made such a remark in class. People were too quick to pounce. But Frank seemed concerned.
She told him about three attractive boys in her seminars, not including Stephen or Ben. One by one, she had met the other three at Tresidder Union, where she gushed her excitement about Eliot’s use of literary allusion or the beauty of “The Seafarer” in the original. All three had traded quips about Yvor Winters with her.
One of them, named Dennis, defended Yvor Winters and even seemed to be on his level. The second one, Wayne, didn’t take Winters seriously and wasn’t at all threatened by him. The third one, whatever his name was, found the modernist poets boring and seemed to feel the same about her.
After listening to her laments, the psychologist, Frank, said, “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking shop with these guys.”
“But we’re all students, studying literature.”
“Maybe you threaten them.”
“But they act so superior with all their knowledge,” she said.
“Men don’t expect women to be smart.”
“Really? Well, yes, I know that.” She rambled on longer about the challenge of sophisticated flirtation and then found herself on a detour to La Honda with Stephen the bad-tempered motorcyclist.
Toward the end of the hour, Frank the psychologist said, “From the way you’re talking about these guys, I don’t think I know them. You speak of them like abstractions, like fantasies.”
“I want to know how to act when the real thing comes along,” she said.
“The real thing?”
“Yes, the Real Thing.”
Frank stared at her, as if she had just asserted her belief in Santa Claus.
“I want to be in love with someone,” she said. “I want someone to be in love with me. That’s what I mean, for it to work both ways. That would be romantic love, the Real Thing.”
SHE BOUGHT A small aluminum percolator and experimented with coffee strength and additives. She added more milk and sugar. She soon became accustomed to sitting down to work at her long table with her coffee on a cork coaster. Coffee made her buzzy and alert, but it wasn’t as strong as Preludin, which transformed her into a whirligig. Now her heart was behaving itself.
The couple next door performed regularly, usually late in the evening, around midnight—not every night but always on weekends. She heard them in their bathroom. She wondered about the color scheme there. Sometimes in the mornings she saw them, moving swiftly down the exterior stairway. They were older than students, and they dressed in drab brown uniforms with yellow piping.
Once in a while, she heard them quarrel, but usually after a time she would hear the bedsprings squeaking. For a few weeks, she didn’t hear them. Then one day their door was open and she glanced into their apartment. She saw that the bed was on the far side of the room. They had simply moved the bed. Their walls glowed bright orange.
FRANK THE PSYCHOLOGIST listened to her, but he wouldn’t answer her questions about his methods. He wouldn’t tell her about the Bandura voodoo doll, or the cultlike origins of the particular school of behaviorism. He was treating Ann the individual, he said; he wasn’t checking off a list of regulation procedures. “Relax,” he said.
“And it’s not a voodoo doll,” he said.
He was wearing a blue Oxford shirt and love beads like those in Pixie’s curtain. If Ann’s parents knew she was seeing a head doctor, especially a man who wore beads, they would go crazy with worry. Her life was mostly a secret from them, but it occurred to her as she told Frank the psychologist about them that perhaps her life was a secret to everyone, even herself. People often said she was standoffish and didn’t reveal her thoughts. Frank himself had observed that she didn’t show her feelings to people she sought approval from, those fantasy boyfriends. And Yvor Winters had accused her of mysterious reticence. Yet when she did manage to express her feelings, people didn’t always take her seriously. Earnestly, she laid her thoughts out for the psychologist, waiting for directions.
He sat there like a knot on a log.
“Why haven’t you asked me about my beads?” he asked.
“Why don’t you answer my questions?”
She felt satisfaction in resisting him. Although the psychologist stirred up troublesome thoughts, sometimes Ann felt a little glow of optimism as she left his cool bower, with the greenery in his waiting room. Since the flowing ferns and cacti and jungle flora required three different climates, their cohabitation was intriguing. But that was appropriate, she thought, for a therapist who could accommodate extremes. Lost persons, with varying degrees of damage, found a home here. It was California. She was really there. One day she spotted an intact pomegranate under the tree in front of his building and dropped it in her bag.
ANN HAD NEVER picked up a date in her own car, but all the old rules were shot. Leonard, a second-year student who was immersed in the poetry of Ezra Pound, asked her to go with him to the city to an exhibition of erotic sculptures fashioned from the metal of junked cars. And then he said, “You’ll have to drive. Unless you want to ride on my bicycle.”
It took an hour to drive into San Francisco. They should have taken the train.
Going there was fine, breezy. Ann knew the roads by now. She chatted with Leonard about architecture and cars. She didn’t challenge his ideas on Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound made her spine crack and made her head feel waterlogged, but she didn’t pursue shoptalk. She asked about Leonard’s background in Rhode Island. He had never heard of the chickens known as Rhode Island Reds. No, not a sports team. She listened to him explain the art they were going to see, and on the way back, she listened to the same observations.
The streets were wrapped in fog then. She could hardly see to drive.
“This is super!” Leonard cried. “I love this. We might just roll out to sea. Look how the light shimmers. You couldn’t get this from poetry!”