by Joel Deutsch
In the kitchen, Daniel turned the ringer of his cordless back on and looked at the little Messages window in its base, which displayed only a lonely fluorescent blue zero. he wasn’t sure if he should feel neglected or simply relieved. He had just flipped open his cell phone to check for missed calls and voice mail when the land line rang. He laid the unfolded cell on the counter, face up, and grabbed for the Panasonic’s handset.
“Daniel, it’s Sheila.” Such a nasal, imperious, matronly voice. Had he really not noticed this before? You go blind or deaf about some things, flashed through his mind, if you sense your survival depends on it, only to ask yourself later what the hell you could have been thinking. Recognitions like this were coming to him these days, sometimes vaporizing like dream fragments but always leaving powdery trails for him to follow.
“Hi,” he said, turning around and opening the refrigerator with his free hand. ” I’m just on my way out the door.” He was starving; at Irina’s, whatever else might happen, he was expecting to be fed, and he had no desire to get caught in another pointless argument about old betrayals real and imagined and who had ruined whose life more, which was what their last call a few weeks previous had devolved into after a reasonably civil beginning.
The milk, when he unscrewed the plastic cap and inhaled, had clearly turned, the Sichuan green beans smelled bad enough without even bothering to open the wire-handled takeout box, the half-eaten banana lying atop a carton of jumbo eggs he couldn’t remember buying, its torn-back peel making it look like a strange cephalopod with its tentacles all akimbo, had gone completely black.
Sheila barged ahead, ignoring the hint. “I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t call you, Daniel, but I realized I have to, just to put my mind at rest about this. I thought, here I am on the patio of the Sunflower Café on a gorgeous Sunday with my red Egyptian tea and my whole wheat bagel and Ian sitting across from me reading that humongous London Sunday Times of his, feeling about as centered and balanced as I could expect of myself, considering, and my cell has a full battery and six bars of signal strength, so here I am.”
“Considering?” asked Daniel, shutting the refrigerator door. That all sounds pretty comfortable to me, Sheila. What’s the problem?” And how’s Ian doing these days?”
Ian wasn’t the man she’d confessed to keeping company with when they broke up. That was Marcello or Maurizio or something, the host at the Echo Park restaurant where she’d dumped him, right there in full view of the Other Man. He hadn’t known who it was at the time, only found out later, but the realization that the dumping had been done over their dinner of Tuscan rosemary chicken (his), fettuccini puttanesca (hers) and a bottle of Barolo in full view of the guy still infuriated him when he thought of it.
Ian was her latest, a British psychiatrist in his slightly doughy age-appropriate 50s as opposed to the Italian’s buff, motorcycle-riding 40. Daniel had met him just once, an accident of bad timing. He’d stopped by their old wine store on Glendale to pick up a couple of bottles of Bordeaux after hiking one Saturday morning in Griffith Park, because he’d been invited to dinner and needed something decent to show up with and a bottle for himself, while he was at it. And there they’d been, Sheila and Ian, cruising the Argentine Malbecs. The three of them had adjourned to a café on Silver Lake that was also one of his and Sheila’s old haunts, where they’d sipped their cappuccinos, nibbled on their biscottis and made the best of an awkward situation. Daniel had thought the man something of a pretentious, overbearing schmuck, actually, but tolerable enough for their 30 minutes or so together.
Ian had come to Los Angeles for the purpose of adding a Southern California branch of his London-based Institute for Psychoforensic Studies to the ones that were already up and running in New York and Berlin.
The key premise of Psychoforensics, Daniel had gleaned from the mission statement on the Institute’s home page, was that our most intransigent mental and behavioral problems, from plain vanilla neuroses to clinical depression to compulsive serial murder, all stemmed without exception from a single source: Excessive physical restraint during infancy.
According to the statement, the baby who would become Genghis Kahn had spent many miserable days trussed up in coils of immobilizing, brine-cured sheep intestines in accordance with an obscure Mongolian practice intended to subdue a squalling infant and teach it self control. Baby Adolph Hitler was confined in a crib of Austrian oak that fitted him so tightly that he could not turn over or move his arms without help. Stalin had regularly been stuffed into a tight leather baby pouch made by his cobbler father and hung from a wall peg in the Dzhugashvili home, his limbs completely pinioned and only his little head visible, in order to keep him out of the way as well as to protect him from being injured by flying cookware, razor-edged Georgian hunting knives, and thick-voiced, heavy-booted stumbling adults when his parents fought or had their neighbors in the town of Gori over to join them in a drinking orgy.
The litany went on and on, citing a dazzlingly eclectic variety of additional examples and case studies: Self-deprecating standup comics inverted sociopathology), priapic politicians and pop stars (sexualized revenge) and underachieved hipster slackers (post-infantile rergressive auto-paralysis). Every case being an expression of what the Institute’s diagnostic lexicon referred to as Constrictive Swaddling Syndrome, or CSS. The supportive footnotes and bibliographical references below the mission statement cited only articles and books written by Ian himself, his wife Margaret, whether current or former Daniel couldn’t tell, or coauthored by the two of them. And a search on Google yielded up no results except for links to the Institute site he’d just visited.
“Ian’s doing great, Daniel.” Her breath seemed to catch. “Daniel,”she said, “listen. God, these are the times I wish I’d never given up smoking. Do you ever feel that way?”
“Of course,” Daniel sighed, wishing she’d get on with it. They’d taken a smoking cessation class together during a period when their marriage had been foundering a few years before, at the urging of a couples counselor Sheila had dragged him to. The class had worked, permanently in terms of the smoking and at least temporarily in terms of the marriage, but he knew about those moments, although he still had no idea what kind of problem Sheila was having that stressed her out badly enough to bring on the cigarette thing.
“Okay, look,” Sheila finally said after a long hesitation. “I can’t deal with this on the phone, Daniel. I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m going to use Ian’s Blackberry to email you a Web link that ought to explain this. ”
“Fine. I’ll look at whatever it is later. I have to go now.”
“Promise me you’ll look at it.”
“I promise, Sheila. Swear to God. Okay? Take care, now.”
There were no missed calls or voice mail showing on the cell phone. He flipped it closed, went back into his bedroom and sat down at his desk to check for email. He glanced through the list of new items in his Inbox. There was something from an attorney on the other side in an auto insurance case, one from a client in a supermarket slip-and-fall,, and one from someone he didn’t know, at least not by their screen name, KindnessOfStrangers. A loud Ding! From Windows’ repertoire of sound effects announced the arrival of another email, this one from Ian at the domain name Psychoforensics.com. he was thinking of clicking it open when there was a knock on his door.
Sasha had also shaved and was wearing a clean long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the collar in the Orthodox style and a small knitted blue skull cap held on by a hairpin on one side. At least he didn’t wear the damned black fedora everywhere, Daniel thought.
“My mom wants to know if you’re still coming over,” sasha said in a tone that Clearly conveyed that he didn’t share her concern. “She says the food’s getting cold.”
To be continued…