ceramic mushroom (red with white spots) that came with a ceramic Alice sitting on
top of it. The Farting Cushion had belonged to Jimmy Eagleton and got a certain
amount of play every year at the Christmas party. The ceramic Alice had been on
Maureen Hannon’s desk—a gift from her granddaughter, she’d told me once.
Maureen had the most beautiful white hair, which she wore long, to her waist. You
rarely see that in a business situation, but she’d been with the company for almost
forty years and felt she could wear her hair any way she liked. I remembered both the
conch shell and the steel penny, but not in whose cubicles (or offices) they had been.
It might come to me; it might not. There had been lots of cubicles (and offices) at
Light and Bell, Insurers.
The shell, the mushroom, and the Lucite cube were on the coffee table in my living
room, gathered in a neat pile. The Farting Cushion was—quite rightly, I thought—
lying on top of my toilet tank, beside the current issue of Spenck’s Rural Insurance
Newsletter. Rural insurance used to be my specialty, as I think I told you. I knew all
the odds.
What were the odds on this?
When something goes wrong in your life and you need to talk about it, I think that the
first impulse for most people is to call a family member. This wasn’t much of an
option for me. My father put an egg in his shoe and beat it when I was two and my
sister was four. My mother, no quitter she, hit the ground running and raised the two
of us, man aging a mail-order clearinghouse out of our home while she did so. I
believe this was a business she actually created, and she made an adequate living at it
(only the first year was really scary, she told me later). She smoked like a chimney,
however, and died of lung cancer at the age of forty-eight, six or eight years before
the Internet might have made her a dot-com millionaire.
My sister Peg was currently living in Cleveland, where she had embraced Mary Kay
cosmetics, the Indians, and fundamentalist Christianity, not necessarily in that order.
If I called and told Peg about the things I’d found in my apartment, she would suggest
I get down on my knees and ask Jesus to come into my life. Rightly or wrongly, I did
not feel Jesus could help me with my current problem.
I was equipped with the standard number of aunts, uncles, and cousins, but most lived
west of the Mississippi, and I hadn’t seen any of them in years. The Killians (my
mother’s side of the family) have never been a reuning bunch. A card on one’s
birthday and at Christmas were considered sufficient to fulfill all familial obligations.
A card on Valentine’s Day or at Easter was a bonus. I called my sister on Christmas
or she called me, we muttered the standard crap about getting together “sometime
soon,” and hung up with what I imagine was mutual relief.
The next option when in trouble would probably be to invite a good friend out for a
drink, explain the situation, and then ask for advice. But I was a shy boy who grew
into a shy man, and in my current research job I work alone (out of preference) and
thus have no colleagues apt to mature into friends. I made a few in my last job—Sonja
and Cleve Farrell, to name two—but they’re dead, of course.
I reasoned that if you don’t have a friend you can talk to, the next-best thing would be
to rent one. I could certainly afford a little therapy, and it seemed to me that a few
sessions on some psychiatrist’s couch (four might do the trick) would be enough for
me to explain what had happened and to articulate how it made me feel. How much
could four sessions set me back? Six hundred dollars? Maybe eight? That seemed a
fair price for a little relief. And I thought there might be a bonus. A disinterested
outsider might be able to see some simple and reasonable explanation I was just