“Hi.”
“Frank?”
“Yeah.”
It was at least a full minute before she said anything else.
“You, you can’t come up now, honey,” she said, pitying me.
When I was a few steps away, I heard her say something else but couldn’t make out the words.
The next afternoon the phone rang, and I was surprised to hear Bob Brandt on the line.
Bob was the head editor at Din-Pro Consortium. We almost always communicated through e-mails.
“Hi, Frank,” he said. “How are you?”
“OK. I mean, I guess I could complain, but nobody listens, right?”
“Yeah. You got that right.”
“How come you’re calling?” I asked.
“Din-Pro’s cutting back, Frank. They’ve taken a big hit in advertising revenue, and I’m going to have to take half your editing load.”
“Oh.”
“And they’re cutting your rate by ten percent. They wanted to cut it by fifteen, but I talked them out of it.”
“Oh. Wow. Thanks, Bob.”
Thanks, Bob.
Both Aguilera and Quarterly allowed me to reduce my payments by fifty percent. I kept seeing them—her on Monday mornings and him on Thursday afternoons.
I asked Christian what the effects of Lessenin-60 were and translated that into the experiences that Agnes expected.
Kara got me a part-time dishwashing job at the Bebop. We got more serious, and she stayed over once or twice a week.
A few weeks later, when I was alone, the phone rang a little after midnight.
“Hello?”
“Are you alone?” Jool asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Can I come up?”
“Where are you?”
“Across the street.”
That was the best sex I’d ever had. Something had been building up ever since we’d separated. I would sit in bed at night thinking of all the things she’d told me, that I’d asked her, about Jim Silver.
“Have you been seeing him again?” I asked, when we were spent, in the early hours of the morning.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Are you in love?”
“It might be that,” she said. “But more it’s like I have to do something. You’re always saying how you’re stuck or whatever, and I’m just getting older. Jim wants to move in with me and maybe get more serious. And you wouldn’t even let me come over.”
“You always said that you liked living alone,” I said, “that you had gotten used to your ways.”
“That was before you asked me if I had kissed Jim.”
“Not when she first met him?” Dr. Quarterly asked.
“No. She’d met him at a design conference and, she says, just kind of fell into a sexual thing. But then when I asked her about it, she started to wonder about why I’d be jealous when our lives were so separate. I guess she realized how lonely she was.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“It hurts when I see her, and it hurts when I don’t.”
Jool and I saw each other every night for a week, and then it was over. She called and said that she couldn’t do it anymore.
“But things have been so strong,” I said, almost arguing.
“We’re acting like kids,” she said. “I’m not sleeping, and sometimes when I’m at your house I’m afraid of the way you look at me.”
“It’s just that I feel, I don’t know, desperate for you.”
“That’s not what I need from a man.”
“Can’t we get together and talk about it?”
“No. It’s over. I’m not seeing you anymore.”
I was sitting on the bed when Jool was breaking up with me for the second time. I felt relieved. Our relationship had run off the road, and that was that.
Sixteen minutes after Jool and I hung up, the phone rang.
I was hoping that it was her calling back and also that she had not changed her mind. I wanted to talk more about getting back together but not to change what had already been decided.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Frank.” It was Kara.
“Hey.”
“You haven’t really been sick have you?”
“No. I’ve had some, um, some personal problems.”
“I don’t want to see you anymore, Frank. It’s just not working. I mean . . . we’re too different. You’re too old.”
Those last three, or maybe four, words hurt me, not because of my age but because I could tell that Kara was trying to hurt me. Her intention was its own end.
“I’ve been seeing another therapist,” I said to Dr. Aguilera that Thursday at the end of our session.
“What do you mean?”
“For the past two months I’ve been going to another therapist.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m stuck, and everything’s falling apart around me.”
“I’m surprised that another doctor would see you knowing that you were already in a therapeutic relationship.”
“I didn’t tell her.”
“I don’t understand, Frank. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t explain it very well. I’ve needed to move on, and I didn’t know how. Every day is just like the last. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m asleep and can’t wake up.”
“We should discuss this at length,” he said. “Not at the end of our time.”
“Now let me get this straight,” Dr. Quarterly said that Friday, at a special time she made available for me. “You have another therapist and have been in treatment with him for the past thirty years.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve chosen you.”
“You said that you hadn’t been in therapy before.”
“Because I wanted to start on a clean slate, to be sure that I could make some advancement with you.”
“But you lied.”
“Those were the secrets I told you about in our first meeting.”
“No, Mr. Lassiter. The basic expectation in therapy is that the patient and the doctor maintain as much honesty as they are capable of.”