“Relieved?” Sarah repeated. It was as if she needed to test the word, to make sure she’d heard it right.
Corrigan shrugged lightly. “Sure. You know: not being shut up in a box anymore with somebody that I really don’t have that much to say to; able to be me without having to try and explain it, knowing that I wouldn’t be understood anyway. Life could be worse.”
Sarah stared out of the screen at him, suddenly calmer now, “Diminished emotional sensitivity index,” she murmured knowingly. “That is one of the symptoms we should expect.”
Corrigan felt himself getting irritated. If he didn’t fit with what their textbooks and case histories said was to be expected, then that was just too bad. He felt fine. “Look,” he said, “if you’re trying to—”
“Careful, Joe,” Sarah cautioned. “Hostility’s natural—you’ve had a big loss. But you have to try to control it.”
Corrigan closed his eyes and forced himself to be patient. “Sarah, really, I’m all right. I don’t especially want to trace her. It wouldn’t work, and anyway, I’m not interested.”
Sarah looked unconvinced but seemed willing to let it go for now. “You and I should still talk about it,” she replied. “I’m at my office this morning. Can you get over here? It would be a good time for us to get together anyway. Dr. Zehl will be stopping by in about an hour. He’d like to see how you’re getting on.” Zehl was Sarah’s clinical supervisor from somewhere in Washington. He had a tendency to show up at irregular intervals, always with little or no warning.
“Is it all right if I have my breakfast first?” Corrigan asked.
“Of course.” Sarah nodded in all seriousness, missing the sarcasm. “I’ll send a cab to pick you up. Make sure you’re ready by, say, ten-fifteen.”
“Thanks. I’ll bring some champagne.”
“What for?” A blank look. She genuinely couldn’t see it. Presumably Corrigan had made another of his erratic connections.
“Never mind,” he said.
Mandy came back to the booth with his order just as Sarah cleared down. She looked pleased with herself. The food looked good, but Corrigan’s breakdown had left him with a disorder of the olfactory system, so that for years nothing had tasted right.
“I get it,” Mandy told him. “I was using `everybody’ the way people talk. But you pretended it was an overgeneralization. It was a play on double meanings, right?”
Corrigan had to think for a few seconds before he realized what she was talking about. “Oh, yes . . . right.” He marshaled a smile and winked at her conspiratorially. “But I shouldn’t let on about it if I were you, Mandy,” he whispered. “People might think you’re crazy.”
Chapter Three
Sarah Bewley was short and plump, with a heavyset face cast in a frown that took the world too seriously. She had wispy brown hair and changed its style to reflect how she felt on any given day. When Corrigan arrived at her office, it was tied back in the flare of mane that was the nearest it could be coaxed toward a ponytail, which he knew meant she was logical and analytic today. (Loose and straggly meant speculative/exploratory; high and tied tight, businesslike/clinical.) He also noted that she was wearing a pastel olive-green skirt and matching top. A couple of weeks previously he had remarked that he thought a regular two-piece would be more appropriate for a professional woman than the mauve cat-suit with boots that she had been squeezed into at the time. Strange. He’d always thought that the therapist was supposed to alter the behavior of the patient, not the other way around.
Dr. Zehl, in tie and light-gray suit, was more what Corrigan would have considered conventional. He was tall, probably in his sixties, with a fresh complexion and high brow that encroached on a head of white, crinkly hair. What always struck Corrigan about Zehl was his eyes. Framed in rimless bifocals, they were constantly alert, shifting, silently interrogating, with a depth that Corrigan didn’t find very often. Sarah, by contrast, although technically Corrigan’s mentor, inspired no feeling of real contact in the sense of true, two-way communication of thoughts that mattered; so he amused himself by playing semantic games with her in the same way that he did with Horace.