A novel by David Buffet
Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Constructive criticism is welcome. Please use the feedback form at the end of the current chapter.
Chapter 2.0
“I’m unused to talking about myself.” The client had shown up out of nowhere, asking for an appointment on the spot. Todd had never had a walk-in customer before, but his practice wasn’t exactly bustling these days. After establishing that the man could pay in cash, he agreed to see him.
They were in Todd’s office—an addition that had been built on the other side of the garage. The man declined a seat, preferring to pace.
“That’s okay,” Todd said, thinking that the guy walked with the tension of a panther. “You can talk about whatever you’d like. But we should probably start with your name.”
“Morey,” the man said. “You can call me Morey.” He was lean, lithe, and darkly handsome, though vaguely nondescript, as if his face had been drawn by a police composite-sketch artist after a six-word description offered by a drowsy leather sub. Todd did his best to deflect the inclination to be attracted to him, thinking counter-transference at first sight, at best, inappropriate.
MORRIS, Todd wrote in his notepad, underlining it twice.
“Hello, Morey,” he said, trying to sound welcoming. “My name is Todd.”
Silence prevailed for a few moments as Morey padded slowly about the room. Normally, Todd had no difficulty maintaining quiet with a client. But something about this one made him edgy. Probably just the aftereffects of the pot from earlier, he thought. He hadn’t had any appointments planned for the day, of course. He had intended to be dead. So there didn’t seem much danger in smoking some pot. Live and learn. He blinked at the irony. “So, you’re unused to talking about yourself?”
“Yes,” Morey nodded, as if the thought had just occurred to him. His voice was deeply resonant, seemingly arising more from the responsive vibrations of Todd’s own bones than the man’s larynx. “Most of the people I meet like to talk about themselves. They’ve got lot’s of questions, of course, but always about them.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Bother?” Morey asked, caught in his paces by the word. “No. It goes with the job. But I’m not here to talk about work.” He continued his tread about the room.
“What are you here to talk about?” Todd had been just about to start his afternoon meditation when Morey had shown up. Perhaps that was another reason he was feeling uncomfortable. He had become used to his hour each afternoon in which he took refuge from the world. He had been particularly looking forward to some quiet time after the day turned out as it had.
“How is this supposed to work? I’ve never done this before.” Morey asked, alighting, tentatively, on the couch. “Counseling, you mean? Well, you tell me what’s on your mind, and we discuss it. There’s no agenda, really. Whatever you’d like to talk about is fine. I’m interested in what you have to say.” He looked consolingly familiar, thought Todd, but only vaguely so. Someone he had known ten years ago, or recently, but only for ten minutes. There was no possibility of placing him. Still, the look was compelling.
Morey grunted noncommittally and began investigating his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Todd found himself at a loss. Normally, he’d be writing down words on his notepad—random thoughts that would later coalesce into Todd’s professional view of the client’s narrative. But no words were occurring to him. Damn that pot.
“…And you should feel free to talk about anything at all here,” Todd continued for lack of anything better to say. “This is a safe place. We can talk about anything you’d like.”
“Anything I’d like,” Morey repeated, testing the sound of the words.
“Absolutely. In strictest confidence.”
Morey narrowed his eyes. They were a penetratingly cold grey-blue. “What would I like to talk about?”
Todd found himself sketching the outline of a duck on his notepad. He frequently doodled during sessions. It helped him concentrate and make connections. “Well,” he offered when it became apparent that the question was not intended to be rhetorical, “what’s on your mind right now?”
“What’s on my mind?” Morey echoed. He spoke as if tasting the words as they passed his tongue.
“Yes,” Todd said. The duck had ended up with a goofy grin and crossed eyes. “Right this moment. What are you thinking of right this moment?”
“Electric can-openers,” Morey said.
“Electric can-openers?”
“Yes,” Morey said in a slow, measured way, coming to the certain conclusion, Todd thought, that that was, indeed, what he was thinking about.
“What about can-openers?” Todd asked.
“Not just can-openers,” Morey said. . “Electric can-openers. I don’t see the point.”
“The point is to open cans, I should expect,” Todd said.
“Why not open them with a regular can-opener?”
“One could.”
“But one doesn’t. One uses an electric can-opener.” The c’s and t’s exploded as they passed his lips.
“And that disturbs you?”
“Disturb?” Morey asked, brows furrowed. “No. It’s something I never understood. That’s what I was thinking about when you asked what I was thinking about. Why electric can-openers?”
“They’re to save time, I believe,” Todd offered, penciling in a sash about the duck’s neck with a prominent number 3 at breast level.
“Yes…” Morey drawled, slowly raising his finger to point directly at Todd—a gesture Todd found inexplicably disturbing. “…But they don’t. They take exactly as long as opening the can by hand.”
Silence hung visibly between them. Todd realized what he had drawn. It was an odd duck.
“Why were you thinking about electric can-openers?” Todd finally asked.
“There is no “why”,” Morey said. “I can never answer “why”.”
Another impenetrable silence condensed from the ether. NEVER “WHY,” Todd wrote under the duck.
“Morey,” Todd began once the interval had become unbearable, “when I said there was no agenda, I meant you could talk about whatever you wanted. But you do have to talk. We could sit here for the entire hour in silence if you choose, but it wouldn’t be particularly therapeutic.”
“I should talk,” Morey observed. Todd waited, determined not to be the one to break the silence this time. At last, Morey took a long slow breath. Todd had seen that breath before. Sometimes it was to gain the courage to speak. Others, it was to buy time to pick from the buffet of issues from which the client had to choose.
“Twilight,” Morey began, the sound of each consonant a little basso bell. “A bewitching word. I’ve been thinking about the word, twilight. Not just the in-between-ness of it. That’s always intriguing. But the sound of it. Twilight. The sound itself conjures the image. There are only a few words that have that power. Undulate. And quiver. You can’t say the word quiver without quivering. Quiver. But twilight? That’s special. An instant drawn out into a phrase.”
Todd, who had become subtly hypnotized by the sound of Morey’s voice, blinked himself back to professionalism. TWILIGHT, he wrote on his notepad. Then, AN INSTANT DRAWN OUT INTO A PHRASE.
“Equinox. Another one.” Todd wrote EQUINOX, then wrote WORDS, and drew arrows from EQUINOX and TWILIGHT to it. “It’s an interesting sound. Equinox. E-qui-nox.” Todd again found himself falling under the spell of the baritone song, and fought against its deceptive smoothness. “The Toktelepi celebrated each equinox with a frenetic, hallucinogen-induced dance that increased in intensity until the sun passed directly overhead, when the dance would explode into communal sexual frenzy. The tribe would writhe in orgasm, which, they believed, assured the fecundity of the world as it transitioned into its new season.”
Todd was staring at the man’s eyes. Morey hardly ever blinked, as if he only did it when he consciously remembered he was supposed to. His long dark lashes made the blazing grey-blue they surrounded a snare. He was still talking. Something about some Malaysian tribe achieving the same effect by offering up a virgin to the gods. Todd couldn’t determine how long the story had been over when he popped back into time and realized they were back in the fog of silence.
Shit, Todd thought. I suck at this. I’m such a fucking fraud. The pot’s paranoia had set in, he decided with a silent sigh. Morey’s face had returned to impassivity. It was clear he thought it was Todd’s turn to speak.
“Are you an anthropologist?” Todd asked, circling the picture of the duck and cognizant that the only solid fact the client had told him was that he didn’t want to talk about work.
“In a way,” Morey replied. “An-thro-po-lo-gist. An-thra-po-lo-gist. A person who makes excuses for mankind? That should be a word.”
There followed another endless pause. Todd shifted in his seat. Meditation was looking a better and better alternative to having taken this appointment. He did it in the office, usually. He had placed a full-length mirror on one of the walls. He’d take out a small pad, place it before the mirror, sit comfortably, and stare, immobile, into the mirror until he disappeared.
“The idea of saving time,” Morey continued out of the vacuum of space. “It’s curious. In the Bank of Time, people only make withdrawals.”
Todd drew a sketch of a bank with the word TIME drawn in the pediment, and then drew arrows to it from TWILIGHT and EQUINOX. “Do you sometimes feel like time is running out?” he asked, venturing a guess as to the point.
“No,” Morey replied. “Time does not run out until…” eyebrows gathering in momentary reflection, his words trailed off to nothingness “…anyway,” he restarted, having come to some internal decision, “it’s an account with nearly inexhaustible supplies.”
“Some people feel like there’s never enough time in a day to do the things they want to do.”
“Yes,” Morey agreed in low tones. “That’s a curious thing about people. Not enough time in a day. Actually, there’s an eternity between breaths. People choose not to notice.”
A great deal had, in fact, happened between consecutive breaths that very morning. One moment, Todd had been his guarded, if pleasantly wasted self, the next, he had been completely stripped of any illusion of privacy. Bo had counted up to eight plaster horsies on the ceiling before Todd could even begin to respond.
“How...” he fumbled, “...how did...”
Still splayed on the couch, Bo had looked over at him with gentle eyes. “Just part of the magic of alchemy,” he had said. “If you believe in that kind of thing.” It was neither condescending nor sharp. There was an oddly comforting warmth to his voice. “If you want to be a good alchemist,” he went on, “you gotta start by knowing what lead looks like.”
Wordlessly, with the kind of prelinguistic silence that extended to the core of his being, Todd rose and shuffled to the kitchen. When he returned, he threw a pint of Haagen Das and a spoon to Bo.
“Good man!” cried Bo, delightedly. “You want some?”
Todd shook his head.
Bo took an overflowing spoonful, savoring each molecule of taste as it went down.
Morey continued talking about time, offering enigmatic takes on everything from Indian summer to the various meanings of the word alarm. Todd watched him talk, his focus shifting from the dark shadow of stubble on Morey’s jaw line, to the small tuft of hair poking out of the top of his shirt where his collar opened, to the tense sinew of his wrists. Todd did his best to take notes, scribbling the words JUNGIAN, and SYMBOLIC THOUGHT. But he was having difficulty listening. No, he was having difficulty concentrating. No, he was having difficulty concentrating on what Morey was saying. Morey, Todd decided, was dangerously attractive.
As a result, there was no center to the notes from which Todd could draw enough arrows to come to any sensible conclusion about what Morey’s issue was. Finally, over a story concerning some ritual surrounding the onset of menstruation among the women of a small Kalahari tribe, Todd wrote a single word. LONELY.
Bo had used that word earlier in the day. A vision of Bo passed across the inside of Todd’s eyelids as he listened. Todd had done his best not to stare at Bo when he had seen him in the bar. Todd had been on a mission, and, he reasoned, people who looked like that didn’t want to be bothered by people who looked like him. There wasn’t a curve about Bo that didn’t bespeak perfection, whether it was the deep convexity where his buttock met his thigh, the gently indented boundary that ran along his upper arm differentiating his biceps from his triceps, or the slightly pronounced cusp in his chin. His lips were full without being feminine. His eyebrows were so blond they were almost invisible, save for a point toward the inside top of each where they went bastard amber. The effect was startling. When Bo wanted to look you in the eye, you could do nothing but look back.
Still, the perfection had not translated, particularly, into attraction. Todd appreciated how stunning Bo was in the same way that one can become lost in the sublimity of a Renoir without ever expecting it would hang in your own living room. It was a beauty one could only visit.
It was almost noon. Bo was dressed by then, back in the jeans, shirt and sheepskin coat in which he had arrived. He and Todd, well bundled, were sitting in the back yard in two frozen deck chairs Todd had forgotten to bring in for the winter. The snow was fresh and uncompacted, save for their footprints.
“So who’s Richard?” Bo asked out of the crystalline, frigid blue. The name condensed into vapor and slowly diffused into nothingness.
“My friend,” Todd answered, the coldness of the air sharpening the edges of pain in his voice. He didn’t bother asking how Bo could possibly have known, certain that Bo would just talk more about magic.
“Did he die?” Bo asked.
Todd nodded.
“You’re very lonely,” Bo said. His cheeks had gone rosy in the cold. Bright, defined swatches of ruby that set off the deep emerald of his eyes. Todd nodded again.
“What’d he die from?”
“Pancreatic cancer,” Todd said quietly.
“When?”
“Last summer.”
Bo nodded.
Morey was finishing up an observation about people who walked up escalators. Morey was lonely, Todd decided. Only lonely people talk so ebulliently about nothing, used, as they are, to saying nothing in response to everything.
“It is a failing of the English language,” Morey said sometime later as Todd reluctantly returned to the present, “that the watch was named after the watch.”
“I’m not following you,” Todd said.
“You will,” Morey intoned in a voice more resonant than normal. “But the watch—the timepiece—it was named after the watch.”
“Like the night watch?” Todd asked.
Morey nodded, an expression of intent seriousness on his face. “Three o’clock and all is well. The job was to watch the town—to protect it—not to keep time. Time cannot be kept. The announcement of the hour was a minor responsibility.”
“But there is the connection.”
“Yes,” Morey said. “But at a price. The watch has become something to watch. People are required to pay attention. People spend time.” There was an added charge to his voice. The intensity made him lean slightly forward. “Do you see?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Todd said, feeling, again, like he had no business calling himself a therapist.
“It’s the commoditization of time,” Morey said, his voice reduced almost to a whisper. “Time is money.”
“And this offends you?”
“Offend?” Morey repeated the word, gauging its weight. “No. I am not offended. It is a mistake.”
Todd drew a watch, wondering if Morey had read Freud and was only talking about what he thought a neurotic client should talk about. Still, Morey had a point: time was money. And it was time, Todd surmised, Morey came to a point.
“Morey,” Todd said, “what made you want to come into counseling?”
Morey leaned back onto the couch, his eyes narrowing slightly. “What made me want counseling?” he repeated slowly. Todd wondered if Morey would have been content to have spent the entire hour explaining why there was no daylight savings time at the equator.
“Yes,” Todd said, encouragingly. “What lead you to come to see me in the first place?”
“Ah,” Morey said. “To see you. Yes.” His eyes returned to their normal dead stare.
“We can talk about something else if you’d like, but you’ve been here for forty-five minutes and I want to make sure you have enough time to...” Todd waved the pencil about, “...to explain.”
“Yes,” Morey said. “You want me to get a good value for my time.”
“Yes,” Todd said, nodding.
“Yes,” Morey echoed. “Well, then.” He went silent.
Bo had gone silent after he had asked about Richard’s death. Hands thrust in pockets and shoulders raised to protect the ears, they just sat there listening to the frozen branches crackle in the breeze. Finally, Todd couldn’t take it any more.
“Look, can I drive you someplace?”
“Where do you want to drive me?” Bo asked.
“No, I mean, can I drive you home?”
“Oh,” Bo replied with a grin, “no thanks.”
“Don’t you need to be someplace?”
“I’m pretty much always right where I need to be,” Bo answered, sniffing away the cold, then wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“That’s some trick,” Todd said, instantly wishing he had settled on a different word.
“Just kind of works out that way,” Bo said, missing, or choosing to ignore the reference.
“So where do you live?”
Bo spread his arms inclusively.
“Where’s that?” Todd asked, imitating the gesture. “Here? There? Everywhere?”
Bo walked up to him so that they were standing face to face, Bo’s extra inch equalized by the way his added weight pressed him further down into the snow. With their arms still outstretched, he pressed his palms against Todd’s. His fingers were longer. “Here,” he whispered, his breath visible as it curled about Todd’s face. “There,” they were matched crucifixes, standing in field of white. “Everywhere.”
“Something is different,” Morey finally said. “Something has changed.”
“Can you tell me what?” Todd asked.
“I have become...interested. Interested in a person.”
In Todd’s mind, everything clicked into place. Middle-aged closet case. That explained it all—why he had just shown up rather than call to make an appointment, why he wanted to pay in cash, why he had chosen Todd in the first place. It even explained the fixation with time. Middle-aged men still in the closet are consumed by the sense that they’ve wasted time.
“That’s not unusual at all,” Todd said. “Perfectly normal, in fact. We all find...” he wanted to make sure he used the same language his client had; it would be a mistake to rush him at this point, “...people in whom we take interest.”
“It is unusual for me,” Morey replied. “It has never occurred to me before to take such interest.”
“Is the person interested in you as well?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Does the person know of your interest?”
“He has begun to suspect.”
There it was: the telltale pronoun. From here it would be routine.
“Have you considered talking to him about it?”
“Talking? No.”
“This is a good start, Morey. I know what you just said was very difficult, and I’m very pleased you felt comfortable enough to say it. I want to repeat that whatever we talk about will be in complete confidence. You don’t have to worry about my repeating anything you say here.”
“I see,” Morey said.
“You should also know,” Todd continued, “that you’re not alone. Millions of men have gone through what you’re going through.”
“That is not correct,” Morey said.
They had stood like that for what seemed like an eternity. Todd couldn’t seem to free himself from the green of Bo’s eyes, or the touch of his palms. When, at last, he did, it was to wracking shame.
“Look,” he said, retreating back toward the house, “I’m flattered but...I mean, thanks and all...look...”
Bo merely put his hands back into his pockets and watched Todd back up. The noon sun, low in the sky, made his hair gleam.
“Look,” Todd said again, “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“I know,” Bo said calmly. “Don’t worry. Neither can I.”
“We have a few minutes more,” Todd said. “Why don’t you tell me a little about him?”
“What would you like to know?”
“Well, when did you meet him?”
“I first met him eight years ago. I had business with his parents. He was very unusual. Even then.”
“Unusual? How?”
“He saw me.”
“He saw you?”
“Very few people do. But I believe he saw me. He followed me with his eyes.”
Todd knew the feeling. Unlike Bo, who was always seen, Todd could walk almost invisibly though a bar. The last time he had been to a club in Seattle, a guy had almost sat on him, not realizing the seat had been taken. It is the destiny of the average looking to live a life while frequently mistaken for being absent.
“Did your...interest in him begin then?”
“No, then it was curiosity. But I came across him on a variety of occasions over the next years. Each time, he followed me with his eyes. I began to see his eyes everywhere. They are...” Morey considered for a moment, “...haunting.”
They sat, listening to the word diffuse into the stillness of the room.
“Things have been getting weird when I hook up,” Bo had said. They were back in the house, warming their hands on mugs of cocoa Todd had fixed up for them. The rose was still in Bo’s cheek. Todd, having difficulty deciding whether Bo looked even better in the shirt than out of it, settled the matter by staring into his cup.
“Weird?”
“Ya, man,” Bo said, taking a sip. “Weird shit.”
“Guys getting all clingy on you?” Todd asked. “Not surprising, really.”
“No,” Bo shook his head. “Not them. Not the other guys. I can handle them. I mean freaky stuff. Like, really freaky stuff.”
“What, like you falling in love with someone?”
Bo guffawed. “Not quite.”
“Like what then?”
Bo leaned forward. “If I told you,” he whispered, “you’d think I was nuts.”
Todd leaned forward and nodded conspiratorially.
“That’s why I was at the club last night,” Bo continued, more conversationally. “It was the safest place for me to be. A club’s a good place to go if I don’t want to hook up.”
“That makes no sense,” Todd said.
“Sure it does. I know the way things work in clubs. I’m in control.”
“No,” Todd repeated, “the whole thing. It doesn’t make sense.”
Bo shrugged. The fabric of his shirt, tight across his chest, caressed him as he moved. “That’s why I asked if anything weird happened this morning. It’s becoming kinda regular.”
“You’ve made me intensely curious,” Todd allowed. “Just what kind of nuts will I think you are?”
Bo grinned. “This from the guy who was going to off himself today?”
Todd laughed. “Fair enough. From one nut to another, then?”
“Take me out for some food,” Bo said. “Maybe I’ll tell you.”
“What if I had plans?” Todd challenged.
Bo smiled. They’d be dining together.
“Do you think you’d like to talk again?” Todd asked. The clock read five ‘till. He wanted to take a nap to get the last of the pot out of his system. He had decided to take Bo to a steak house. He suspected Bo would enjoy that.
“I suspect I would enjoy that,” Morey said. Todd blinked at the coincidence.
“Would you like to make an appointment?”
“Is that how it is usually done?” Morey asked.
“Usually,” Todd allowed. “But not necessarily.” He didn’t want to scare the client away. “I’m going to give you my card. You can call if you’d like another appointment. If I’m not in the office, or if I’m in another appointment, you’ll get my answering machine. Is there a way I can contact you?”
“Always,” Morey said, without offering a hint as to how. Todd shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Morey looked vaguely different than he had when he walked in. Was it his hair? His expression? The pot? It must have been the pot. Todd was finding him sexy.
“Well you’ve made good progress for a first meeting, Morey.”
“I have?”
“Indeed,” Todd said, writing CLOSETED at the center of the page, then circling it. I HAVE BECOME INTERESTED IN A PERSON, he scribbled, drawing arrows from it to CLOSETED and LONELY. “We can, of course, talk about whatever you’d like when you return, but I’d like you to think about what you would say to this person if you could say anything you wanted to him without his being offended. Pretend you had permission to say everything you wanted to say.”
“Pretend?” Morey repeated.
“Yes,” Todd continued. “It’s a kind of game. Some homework. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yes,” Morey said.
“I’m afraid your time is up,” Todd said, looking at the clock.
“That’s usually my line,” Morey said.