The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 9

"You don't need a secretary," I told him.

Keith grunted through a mouthful of doughnut. "I want a secretary. It made things so much easier when I was a senator."

"You're not a senator. You're an editor. Of sixteen pages a month."

"Cheryl was a huge help. Just having someone around to bounce ideas off of. She was psychic, too, she always knew when to go out and get me a sandwich."

"Think like a businessman. You answer the calls yourself, not only do you have more money for things like marketing, but you're more hands on, you have a better handle of what's coming and going."

"And who am I supposed to flirt with?"

I wondered if he was playing with me. "Rich."

"You really don't think I need a secretary?"

"No. And I think you'd enjoy doing that work yourself anyway."

He sighed. "You're the boss." He was sitting in the office's only chair, beside the only table, which currently supported only a console, a picture of Lysa on top of a mountain and a box of doughnuts. I was standing. Keith and Rich had moved the table and the chair in this morning, offering repeated assurances that I'd have my own space as long as I was helping them. But Rich had disappeared and there I was with Keith in the echoing, chair-deprived room. It was three weeks after what had turned out to be our final session. The ink on his exit survey, fluttering anonymously off to the West Coast Psychology Report offices, was barely dry. If they knew what I was doing now, my license would be gone before another three weeks was up.

Keith had no idea. It had clearly never occurred to him -- or maybe he assumed that if I wasn't allowed to hire myself out to a client, I'd have said something. He had a trust in my professionalism that bordered on religious faith.

"Well, you're the boss. It's really up to you."

"No, no." He waved me off. "If you think I don't need one..." He flicked a finger at the console screen. "Marketing, do it in-house or outsource it?"

"You and Rich need to decide who you want to market this thing to, first. Universities? Armchair environmentalists? Are you going to support it with ads, or just subscription costs?"

"Subscription costs, subscription costs. We already talked about that. We don't want any corporate influence."

"Are you sure? A lack of incoming ad money can have its own influence."

"Yeah. Listen, do you think I need a better chair? I am the editor. And this thing is... crap."

Now I was pretty sure he was playing with me. He was rocking, watching me, fidgety.

"Would a better chair help you focus on defining your market?"

"Yes... absolutely, yes, doctor." Keith grinned.

I caught a pained smile on my own face. "I'm curious... what did you tell Rich about who I was?"

Keith let the front legs of the chair hit the carpet. He leaned forward and I tensed. "I told him you were a business consultant I knew."

I didn't say a thing.

"I thought it might be a bit awkward. Right?" His voice was quiet and I felt it even in my nervous abdomen. "Not that there's anything wrong with therapy. But people don't always know how to take it. Well, I could bring some other people onto the project and make it okay. Hey, Rich, here's Fred, he does accounting but he was also my dental hygienist. And Gloria, she does filing, but I met her back when she was my yoga instructor."

His smile was gentle and at that moment I became powerfully aware of my surroundings, the white walls around us, the air in the room and his presence, which was, to me, so full and vivid that I was literally afraid. He was Keith Wright, in the flesh. We were outside of my office, we were in the world, and he hadn't dissipated to a phantom. He was real. My heart was pounding. "Wait, I forgot, we don't need a secretary... forget Gloria... screw Gloria" he was saying, and I was thinking that he must know, any second now. He would see it in my eyes and know I was forfeit to dissolute processes, that when I went home to my apartment I could not think of anything but him. That last night I'd dreamed he kissed me, so real I felt the breath from his nose tickling my cheek, and I woke up in hot fear.

He finished by saying his head hurt from thinking about business, that Rich had obviously abandoned us and we should go out to lunch.

So I finally had Keith, after a fashion. I had what I wanted. It's funny how when he told me he'd left office, finally and before his term was up, I was angry. It took me a moment to remember that was what I'd wanted him to do -- to leave, to follow his dream, to be happy and healthy and a contributing member of society like every psychiatrist should want her patient to be. But when he told me, I was angry he could be so irresponsible. I barely even noticed I felt it, but I did catch it, just before Keith changed the subject again.

And I was about to accept his offer to lunch when Rich finally burst back in, an office chair in his arms, and Keith sprung into action as between the two of them they moved all the furniture in and spent an hour arranging it to their liking. Lunch was forgotten. I clicked through catalogs of office supplies while they worked, hollow with the loss.

By now I knew everything. Infatuation may be blind, but I had still had seven years of education in psychology, and by this point was quite capable of self-diagnosis. I was under the influence of animus, as they say -- or perhaps I should after all say anima in my case, considering my particular attributes. Keith was everything I lacked: he was effusive where I was restrained, emotional where I was reserved, trusting where I was skeptical, spontaneous where I was careful.

I was aware of projecting... at least, I say this now. The truth was that, as I thought: How wrong can I be? How far off can I be? If I'm seeing and responding to nothing more than an image projected from my unconsciousness, how far off yet can it be? when the man is a Boy Scout senator, environmental activist, devoted monogamist, nice guy? How far off from perfect can he really be? In short, how could I really go wrong by getting closer to someone of such moral fiber and harmless good cheer?

Paradoxically, the twin obstacles of my being his former therapist and his being utterly, incontrovertibly married only spurred me on. That having me around apparently meant enough to him to ignore not only legal but social convention struck my heart with special poignancy, precisely because it was the opposite of how I'd lived my whole life. I could not think of a time I had put a friend in front of a rule, and now began to rue myself for it. And Lysa? She was the icing on the cake, the balm that let everything roll forward smoothly. Keith was safe. I might pine for him to the depths of my soul, but he would never leave his wife. My feelings would have no consequence. No one would be hurt.

He did take me out to lunch, of course. Many times. I say with satisfaction that many of those times, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Keith loved tacos but hated mess. He was almost prissy in that respect. He would eat with his face practically against the plate, trying not to get the tiniest spot of hot sauce on his expensive wool. Yet he still talked through his food. He couldn't stop talking. He made me laugh. I remember getting up one morning feeling as though I was twenty again and had been up all night doing sit-ups, trying to get in shape for track season. He was oddly generous as well as amusing. Sometimes when we were out purchasing something or visiting a printing company he would get an urge and put the car down somewhere unfamiliar, saying he wanted to show me "this great spot." I stood with Keith in the middle of a garden of orchids, listening to him overflow with everything he loved about the flowers. He was not courting me. It was just how he was.

I let my practice tail off over the next year until I was seeing just a handful of clients. There was something oddly fulfilling about my life now, going into the city a couple days a week to help with the journal. Keith was especially grateful to me on one account: I had provided the name. I was talking about marketing. I said "The California Nature Review" would appeal to one kind of audience, and a more poetic name to another. I chose "Monsoon" as an example, not thinking much about it until Keith asked me why Monsoon. I struggled for a moment, then I remembered a movie by that name I'd seen as a young girl -- about an Indian meteorologist who fights the powers that be over global warming. For some reason that idea tickled him and he became besotted with the word. Or maybe he was tickled by the idea of my having been a young girl. I couldn't be sure. In any case we figured the connotations were fine, and it let him feel a poet, so we kept it.

So my life became richer with enjoyment. But it simultaneously became threadbare of purpose -- I had come so that I wanted nothing other than to know that man, and while I increasingly got it, there was an empty sort of tension in it. I had achieved much of what I wanted, yet I felt more than before as if I were waiting for something, that there was something about me that had become forever imminent.

And so I waited. But I would be remiss to say that the waiting was the last of it. There was also the pain. The times he conversed with Rich, and though I tried to join the conversation, Keith waving me off or ignoring me, and Rich unwittingly following his irresistible lead. I felt vanished. Some days Keith would be in a black mood, and though it never lasted long, his moods provoked special hurt, partly because of the things he said and partly because I could not figure them out. There in the Monsoon office, with Rich and the newly hired staffers running in and out, I couldn't play therapist anymore:

"Just go home. I need to get this done. Why do you always have to take issue with every little aspect of how we run this thing? You're acting like my mother-in-law."

The sudden ugliness and unfairness in his words would hit me like a punch, out of left field. And more than one part of me would head straight for why... why do you say that? Why are you in a bad mood today? Why won't you talk to me? but I would bite down hard. "Keith, it's just a few paragraphs. You have all day to finish it. You told me you wanted to know if your intro ever sounded pedantic, right?"

"I'm not the one who's pedantic, all right? Let me write or there won't be an intro for this issue."

My mind reeled. Where was this coming from? Who had swapped my smooth politician with an indecipherable fourteen-year-old punk? What was he thinking? That was the very worst; not the behavior, but the randomness of it; to know that after all this, I could still be blindsided. My gut would twist and I'd go home eventually, and stew until I saw him again. Until I could make things clear. This happened every few weeks.

So that was where we were when I was finally invited into his home, for the big party he threw election night. Everyone in the office was invited, and I was tingling as I knocked on his door, my heart pounding again as it had the first time we stepped out from my office. This is real. I'm getting what I want. But it was his wife who opened the door, and my reaction to her presence hit me with the surprise of an entire firehose of cold water.

That was the November everyone thought the Greens finally had a chance -- in fact, it was to be the year they finally won the presidency. But that is not the political development I remember most from that night.

Of course, it would not be -- in fact -- what any of us here remembers most from that night.

The most overdue Middle ever

Wow, ten months and I feel like I'm finally getting to the story. You know the idea about how the first thing you do when rewriting a story should be to go back to the beginning and delete the first page... I think in my case if I went back and deleted parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 I'd be doing pretty well. But I'm relieved to discover there IS a story waiting to be told, rather than just endless foreplay. Well, I knew there was. For once I had some idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. I just seemed to have forgotten about it for about thirty pages.

I have a thing for dialogue, I love to write dialogue. And I always feel like I'm indulging it too much. I can go on for pages with just dialogue. So I always feel like I need to be breaking it up with some exposition. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or chagrined seeing that a major issue with the story as it is is that I keep interrupting perfectly reasonable dialogue with ridiculous comments about who shifted which way in what chair.

I was at the library the other day looking for new books to read about writing. I'm very picky about self-help books. I'm chauvinistic. I am biased toward action. I don't really want to read about how to write. I just want to do it. At least, I like to think I want to do it. That's the really chauvinistic part. The point is that I tend to disregard any book that sounds wishy-washy. I don't want to discover my true inner self. I just want to be reminded of what order the basic story elements come in.

I have no problem telling a story when I'm not thinking about it. I sometimes do this at parties. Not at parties where I'm trying to impress anyone, though. My ability to tell a story decreases in proportion to the amount I think about it, to the point that most of the stuff I write has about as much plot energy as a typical hour of C-span. Maybe I do need to discover my inner self. She's probably an accountant.

The Keith Wright story makes a surprising amount of sense for something that came from my keyboard. One thing leads to another (just like in real life!) and things happen that basically make sense. I'm not sure to what I should attribute this. The mermaid thing is also surprisingly coherent, and I attribute that to the fact that it's not the first time I wrote it. The first time I wrote it was when I was doing the exercise of making myself write a story in two pages every night. This put pressure on me to consider such important things as Beginning, Middle, and End. Lawdy. Maybe I should do that again.