“My wife said to tell you that I made her coffee this morning,” he’d said.
“What makes that important?”
“Usually I just make it for myself. I don’t know what got into me.”
“And?”
“She kissed my head.” Trained to know that I want to hear about feelings, not just behaviors, he’d squirmed and added, “It felt okay.”
It made sense that he’d be shut tight in reaction to this lapse, but it wasn’t his style to be late. By 8:15, I was fighting down the urge to give him a call. I knew it would be to quiet my nerves, not for him, so I cleaned out my purse instead. I took my time, throwing out the wadded credit card receipts, paper clips and even one desiccated lipstick I’d bought on impulse but never wore because the color made me look sallow.
I hate patients no-showing. Always have. It makes me feel that I’ve screwed up in some way. In an attempt to soothe myself, I began to circle the consultation room, looking out each window in sequence—the two parking spaces just off the street, the elm with the frenetic woodpecker still hard at work, the view of the back of the house screened by a huge, flaming-pink crape myrtle and the old live oak cradling the children’s tree house in its branches. The beauty of our backyard raised the ugly question of what I’d do for a workspace should Richard and I go through with the divorce. There was no doubt I’d have to relinquish the house, a consideration that only served to ratchet up my agitation.
I remember the accusing gaze of my life-sized bust of Freud, a graduation gift from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, following me from his spot on the bookshelf. To appease him, I’d asked myself what the good Dr. Sigmund would say about the situation. He’d say, of course, that Howard’s defenses were loosening. That this was a great opportunity for insight! I’d rolled these ideas around in my mind like worry beads. It didn’t help.
In retrospect, I was far too concerned about things that had no importance—like whether I’d made some therapeutic mistake or whether Howard’s absence presaged my losing a hard-earned analytic patient. In retrospect, I wasn’t concerned enough about things that really mattered—like the fragility of the human psyche and life itself. Or the potential for one terrible event to start a catastrophic slide down a slope made slippery by fear and selfishness.
For all the good that retrospect does.
I learned Howard was dead on the nightly news. I was putting dinner together, cooking being one of the few downsides to Richard’s and my separation. The kids had been fighting over which show to watch for their thirty-minute television allotment. As punishment, I made them endure the wrap-up of the day’s traffic jams, city council spats, and detailing of San Antonio’s intractable summer heat. They wrestled around on the rug, keeping the bickering just below the threshold of what would set me off again.
“Mom, look! It’s your patient.” Alex jumped up, knocking his Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper onto the rug, the beige and sage green oriental Richard had haggled into possession on our Turkish honeymoon.
Professor Westerman’s face on the screen—the stunned photo from his Trinity University Chemistry Department ID badge—was unmistakable.
“Hey, Stupid. Mom can’t say who her patients are.” Tamar was smug. “It’s called con-fi-den-ti-al-i-ty.”
“Dwarf-brain, it says he’s dead. If he’s dead, she can say. Privacy Case Law. It was on Dad’s TV show last week.”
“Whoa! He blew himself up.” Tamar’s eyes opened wide. “Maybe it was a suicide bomb.”
“He wasn’t a terrorist. That’s so stupid,” Alex said. “They think it’s an accident, Mom. Can we change the channel now? Pleeeese?”
I thought about the voicemail I’d ended up leaving that morning. Howard’s wife would find it—her husband’s analyst politely but firmly inquiring as to his whereabouts. I imagined her return call: This is Camille Westerman, calling on Howard’s behalf. He regrets not being there for his appointment, but he is in smithereens. Do you charge for sessions missed due to unanticipated death?
I soldiered through the motions of our dinner routine, total numbness alternating with gut-ripping waves of guilt. The word blindsided kept looping around in my mind. As if somehow I could have seen it coming, which maybe I should have. Mike Ruiz says people get blindsided because their eyes are closed. I take offense at that—or pretend to—a private investigator presuming to teach a psychoanalyst something about denial. About repression. About the power of the Unconscious to put our head up our butt and keep it there. But the fact is that I didn’t see Howard Westerman’s death coming. Or the death of my second patient, as Detective George Slaughter, SAPD Homicide, would take great pleasure in pointing out. Or even that of my third patient, which I would witness with my own eyes. Despite years of experience as a psychoanalyst, I failed to anticipate each and every one of those fatal events, not to mention the violence I would prove capable of myself.
Chapter Two
A brief obituary in The San Antonio Express-News announced a memorial service for Professor Westerman to be held on Wednesday at four o’clock in the Trinity University Chapel. Odd timing for such an event in a way. On the other hand, it was late enough to accommodate work and early enough to not constrict plans for the evening. Howard, I thought, would have approved of the efficiency.
I debated attending the service all the way to the chapel door. Did I think it would do Howard good? Did I need to go for myself? Some of my colleagues, the theoretically conservative ones, would later argue that my very presence was a breech of confidentiality, a sign that I was already off my rocker. And maybe I was. Certainly, Howard’s privacy wasn’t a top priority for me. What I told myself was that being human was the important thing. But then we humans will tell ourselves anything to justify what we want to do. That I felt compelled to check out Camille Westerman is probably closer to the truth. Not that I would have known that at the time.
The media presented Howard’s demise as accidental—a little chemistry experiment in his home workshop gone wrong. But Freud didn’t believe in accidents, and neither did I. Deep down no one believes in accidents. We all want meaning. We prefer the illusion of control over what matters in our lives, no matter how irrational the explanation. And so, as I grew tired of irrationally blaming myself for Howard’s death, I began to irrationally target Camille.
Though I hadn’t met Howard’s wife, I had a picture of her in my mind, and I scanned the gathering for that imagined, tight-faced woman in black, the dowdy professor’s wife with red-rimmed eyes. As it turned out, the real Mrs. Westerman did wear black, a St. Johns knit that revealed just enough cleavage under her three strands of pearls to push at respectability. Her studied beauty only served to fuel my budding suspicion. She sat front row, of course, a mirror-image son on either side. As each eulogist descended the lectern, she stood, extended a hand and presented her smooth cheek for a condoling kiss.
Howard and Camille never qualified as a heaven-made match. She comes from old money, from the oil well-drilling, ranch-owning, dove-hunting elite of the self-contained municipality of Alamo Heights that occupies central San Antonio. Alamo Heights—City of Beauty and Charm, it says on the green population signs marking the town border. I’m not kidding. It’s a preciously insular world, populated with folks who affectionately call their town The Bubble. They’re people proud to have never set foot out of Texas, direct descendants of the gang that invented Fiesta—the ten day, faux-Mexican Mardi Gras imitation that celebrates their claim to privilege with parades, coronations and costumes costing tens of thousands of dollars, while simultaneously providing greater San Antonio’s Latino population the redoubtable opportunity to honor the brutal defeat of their ancestors at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.
The man Camille had set her sights on marrying during their