She applies more paint to the canvas as he watches. If she is withdrawn, it’s an inner thing, nothing visible to the naked. He knows enough to stand behind her, not intrude on her line of sight. She’s studying herself in the window. He kisses the nape of her neck. She continues to work. The painting is a self-portrait, another one. It seems narcissistic — a term she would loathe — and he can’t resist recalling the list of cardinal symptoms: grandiosity, the need to be admired, preoccupation with fantasy, a lack of empathy. But he doesn’t want to think about that. He isn’t about to diagnose, he isn’t being asked to analyze. He wants to live this moment, experience it in all its richness, without thinking of what has passed or what will come. Which is hard. Which is impossible; only fools and madmen can manage it.
In the painting her head and shoulders float; there’s no line of breast, curve of belly. The outline of her face holds the colours of a prism — reds, yellows, violets — as if in the wavelengths of light she is depicting a Doppler shift of mood — heat to coolness, near to far — away from here, away from him. But perhaps he’s reading too much into it. He examines the eyes, sky blue, deeply set, clearly hers. But somehow detached from the face as if they were sketched on the windowpane. They are weeping, and the tears seem to bleach the colours of the garden beyond: sun-faded plastic of patio furniture; tired purple flowers; the dusty climbing vines that Cynthia planted along the fence when they first moved here.
“I like it. It’s very good.” And perhaps she hears something in his voice, a tone audible only to her? For she turns away. He takes her hand — her right, not her brush hand — and kisses it, tastes the liquor of paint, turpentine, the hint of dark earth in the cracked terrain of skin.
“What do you like about it?”
“The flowers,” he says, “they’re very nicely done.” He comments only on the background and imagines she doesn’t notice.
“The cheeks are too fat.” She is foreground, Cynthia, always the subject. “Do you think it looks like me?”
How to respond? What is there to say? He’s a trained observer, yes. Surely there is something to be said about the monomania of self-portrait? The body dysmorphia of cheeks fat or thin, eyes sunken as buried desire, pupils like holes burned in canvas. What of the shapes? What of the colours?
If he were to speak now, she would be impatient with him. “I didn’t marry an analyst” — something she has said often. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you feel,” as if they were two separate things, and maybe once they were not. He responds as a husband. “I think it’s wonderful,” caressing her cheek, “it’s a beautiful painting. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
She frowns. He’s patronizing her. Or worse: he’s blind to her inadequacies. She can’t stand that. It’s infuriating. She desires something in him — ruthlessness — that she calls honesty. He can’t manage it.
Cynthia brushes away his comment. Munin retreats to the door. Throughout the exchange she hasn’t turned. Now her profile is one-quarter, one-eighth, nothing, as she remains fixed on her reflection, the brush hesitating over the canvas. She doesn’t say anything more; her eyes don’t follow him as he goes. Something else he notes but doesn’t comment on.
“Cynthia ...?”
He waits for her to respond. The expectation in his voice is audible, but she doesn’t pick up. The phone records the long pause not as hesitation, indecision, analogue thoughts hissing unexpressed, but as something binary — not presence only absence — before he hangs up.
The first aspect of love was narcissism. As in the story of Narcissus, a myth as ancient as love itself. The youth who was condemned to love only himself. When he saw his reflection in a pool of water, he realized his love was unattainable and stabbed himself in the breast.
He was an invert, a homosexual, or so Freud believed. He had taken himself as the sexual object, and would doubtless have searched agora, village, shepherd’s field for someone who resembled his reflection. But the embrace would be an empty one: water is cold, it runs though your fingers, and in its depths there is only darkness.
Munin knows the unattainable wasn’t what killed Narcissus. It was need. Or rather the realization, as he stared at his image, that the pool was endlessly deep. The water reflecting eyes reflecting water, on and on. We can never satisfy our desires. The empty search, the thirst that cannot be quenched, the pool of need that cannot be plumbed. It overspilled its banks, flowed from pool to stream to river. It was a vast flood, enough to fill an ocean, drowning everything and everyone.
They meet at eight for cocktails in the hotel’s grand ballroom, an intimate gathering of a thousand guests. They have been specially selected by tonight’s host, Janus Pharm, a Swedish pharmaceutical company. They are the experts, the key opinion leaders, the high prescribers.
The theme tonight is “Go West!” The room is decorated with a mock Apothecary Shop stocked with modern-day detail aids — when the healing needs help — along with flashlights and free pens. In the Dry Goods Store there are sombreros sporting the product logo, lapel pins, key slides, interactive software. There are Conestogas filled with souvenir serapes featuring a two-headed Janus that Hughes calls Mr. What?What? as if the head were a cartoon freeze-frame looking ahead to the future but also behind at something in pursuit.
In the far corner of the room there’s a three-piece combo playing cowboy tunes. There’s a lariateer doing tricks with rope. Waiters in western gear sidewind through the crowd, spurs jingling, serving Tex-Mex hors d’oeuvres — fiesta mussels, guacamole, stuffed chayote. Young women in Navajo vests are pouring California wine, margaritas and Mexican beer, open bar courtesy of an educational grant. The food stations are chuck-wagons with tenured professors waiting in the chow line, paper plates overflowing with fajitas and refried beans.
At the reception desk they are branded with ID cards, invitees only: the wagons are circled tonight. Munin and Hughes are spotted at once. “Good — you made it. I’m glad you could come.” A petite woman in a black cocktail dress identifies herself as Judith Moore. She is vibrating with nervous tension. “Your flight — I saw it arrived on time. Any problems?” But before they can answer she is interrupted by the squawk of her walkie-talkie. “They’re here,” she tells it. To Munin: “Soren has been very anxious to meet you.”
“Not too anxious — he’ll be his own best customer,” Hughes says. Well, Judith’s smile is a little forced; her client’s product is a drug to treat anxiety disorders.
“Soren and I have talked on the phone,” Munin says, intentionally bland, “about my presentation.” He can see she’s stressed, too thin, terribly intense as she scans the room; slight exophthalmia there, perhaps a thyroid deficiency.
Judith hands them both a small binder that will be distributed at the meeting. She flips it open to show Munin the page with his postage-stamp photo, brief bio, an abstract of a case that he recalls having reviewed a few months ago. The session is a satellite to the annual meeting, all content sponsored by Janus Pharm. “I’ve sent welcome packages to your rooms. The event is Thursday evening, 6:00 p.m.”
“We got the package, thanks.”
“We’re expecting a good turnout. We’ve got about six hundred people pre-registered.” She doesn’t mention that many of the delegates have been paid to attend.
Munin uses the