Kem Nunn - Chance

It seemed straightforward enough, really. Mrs. Blackstone’s memory problems were clearly secondary to psychiatric distress, engendered most directly from her continuing to see the abusive husband from whom she is ostensibly seeking a divorce. “The development of secondary or multiple personalities occurs most frequently in the context of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse,” Chance had written. “I think it is important for this warded-off aspect of her personality to be addressed and, ideally, integrated into her basic persona. However, as long as she continues to have a relationship with a person whom she both despises and fears, there is little reason to believe that her underlying anxiety can be successfully treated with pharmacologic approaches.”

By way of treatment, he had recommended that Mrs. Blackstone consider psychotherapy. He had also recommended that she work with a female therapist and had offered a name, Janice Silver, a therapist in the East Bay he believed to be particularly good.

In most cases that would have been the end of it, and there was nothing about this case to suggest that Jaclyn Blackstone was the type of patient he would ever see more than once. Nor was it likely she would have replaced Mariella as the object of his obsession. She would have faded back into that great gray array of the lost and lonely, the neurasthenic and terminally distraught, the walking wounded he saw by the score day in and day out. But then two things happened.

The first was a chance meeting with Jaclyn Blackstone on the streets of Berkeley. It was quite unplanned and took place in a trendy little shopping district at the northwest side of town. He was still trying to figure out what to do about his furniture and Carl’s offer and Big D and all of that and was poking about in the Art and Architecture store on Fourth Street, looking through a book on French Art Nouveau furniture, when he caught sight of Jaclyn Blackstone among the aisles. It was scarcely two months since she’d visited his office yet he was struck by how different she looked. At the time of his evaluation she had worn a shapeless sweater over an old-fashioned blue print dress, her hair pulled loosely back, held by the kind of small white combs a little girl might use. She had looked all of her thirty-six years and then some, matronly, he had thought at the time. In the store she wore jeans and running shoes and a leather jacket over a yellow T-shirt and was anything but matronly. Her hair was different too, shorter, trendier. The fact was, she had caught his eye and it was only upon closer scrutiny that he realized who it was. The recognition was followed rather quickly by the thought that maybe this was not Jaclyn at all, but Jackie, and he wondered if she would see him and if she did, would there be any sign of recognition, though he also understood that even as Jaclyn she might not be so eager to say hello given the circumstances of their original meeting. He was therefore a bit surprised when, as their eyes met and after only a momentary delay, she favored him with a rather shy smile and a little wave of the hand.

Their paths crossed at the end of the aisle. They were both holding books. “Don’t you love this store?” she asked.

“I do. What are you reading?”

She held up a rather small book with a picture of two wooden chairs on the cover. “I like to find old pieces of furniture that I can strip and redo.”

“Antiques?”

“Nooo. Junk.” She produced an iPhone, pulled up her photographs, then scrolled around a bit before finding something for him to look at, half a dozen straight-back wooden chairs that had not only been rather gaily painted with pastel washes but bore as well the likeness of movie stars reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened portraits.

“Madonna and Marilyn,” she told him. “I call them my icon chairs.”

“These are quite good,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Yeah?” She found two other chairs that had pictures of dogs on them. “I like dogs too,” she said.

“Me too. Do you have one?”

She looked away. “I did. But I lost him,” she said. Her smile of only moments before had given way to a look of profound distress.

“I’m so sorry. It’s sad to lose a pet.”

She nodded. “I have a cat.” Her eyes clocked to his book. “What do you have?”

He showed her the book on French furniture.

“Well, see…” she said. “Yours is fancier than mine. But then you’re the doctor.” It was the first reference either had made as to why they were even standing here talking.

“Yes, well… I have some furniture kind of like this that I’m thinking of selling.”

“Well don’t think too long,” she told him.

He laughed. “Now why would you say that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like good all-purpose advice. One could say it about so many things.”

It was almost as if she were flirting with him. He was even beginning to wonder if she’d lied. Maybe there were more than two of her. He was also enjoying her company and in a short while discovered that he had moved with her into the checkout line at the register where he felt somehow obliged to buy the book he carried even though it was more money than he’d wanted to spend if for no other reason than to prolong the pleasures of the moment.

Minutes later, on the sidewalk in front of the store, the absurdity of it all descended on him for the first time. In the twenty years of his marriage he’d been faithful to his wife, raising his daughter, building a practice. He’d seen no one since the separation. That he was suddenly standing here, amped like some schoolboy in the presence of an attractive woman he just happened to have seen as a patient, that he just happened to know was possessed of at least one secondary personality willing to engage in rough sex with an estranged spouse, by all accounts a dangerous psychopath, was enough to render him at least momentarily speechless. The really disturbing part was that he was also trying to decide if he should invite her to coffee as there was one of those upscale little East Bay coffee joints almost directly across the street from where they stood. Mercifully, she spoke first and thereby, he would conclude later, saving him from God only knew what horrors. “I just want you to know that I’m seeing the therapist you recommended,” she said. “It’s changed everything.” When next he spoke it was as what he was, a doctor addressing a patient on the occasion of a chance meeting in a public place. “I’m so glad to hear that,” he said. “And you’re feeling better?” He might have added that she looked like a million bucks but decided against it.

“I am,” she said. “I’m feeling better than I have in a long while.”

They stood for a moment with this.

“Well…” Chance said.

“Sometimes I use numbers,” she told him.

Chance just looked at her.

“On the furniture,” she added. “Formulas, sometimes, or geometric shapes. But sometimes just numbers.”

“Ah.” He recalled that she was also a teacher.

“I substitute,” she corrected. “I started doing it again, after the separation…” She allowed her voice to trail away, as if from the subject.

“You’re looking well,” Chance said, acting suddenly on his earlier impulse. If he’d hoped to put the smile back on her face he was successful.

“Am I?” she asked, and in doing so managed somehow to shift the tone of their meeting ever so slightly once more.

Was it him, he wondered, or did she really know how to play it so well? Or perhaps he was not according her the benefit of the doubt. He’d seen therapy turn people around. Why not Jaclyn Blackstone? “You are,” he said finally. “I almost didn’t recognize you there in the store.”