BECAUSE THE STOREKEEPER IS WEARING A WHITE butcher coat he makes her think of a movie she went to with her husband once-back in their married days- a movie in which a butcher (who was also a psychopath) courted a beautiful woman with fresh cuts of meat. He would appear outside the little schoolhouse where the woman was giving lessons to her students, the newly sawed leg of some animal wrapped up in pink butcher paper, a florist's twist where its hoof would have been. The memory of the shock she'd felt when what she had taken to be a bouquet of flowers appeared, in the camera's close-up, to be a crude rosette of red meat instead of red petals, makes her almost jump when Habib bows to present her with a bouquet of actual flowers.
"Thanks, Habib, but what's the occasion?"
"Spring is the occasion. And to celebrate this rare Canadian phenomenon we are making a small presentation of flowers. But only to our very best customers."
"In other words, to all your customers."
"Yes," Habib tells her. "All."
SPEARED AND FURLED IN THEIR GREENISH GLASS JUG, the irises have a churchy but phallic look. She places the jug on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, then carries the tulips, in a clear glass pillar, to the room whose sofa looks out over the muddy back garden. But before she was awarded the flowers she was perched on another sofa-the sofa at the Fowler Institute-waiting to see which of the Institute's four doctors would turn out to be her doctor. The doctors at the Institute were medical doctors who no longer practised medicine. In fact, the friend who'd recommended the Institute to her had referred to her own Institute doctor as a psychoanalyst who was also a gymnast. It was clear that these doctors weren't the sort of doctors who would attire themselves in the white lab coats of butchers or shopkeepers, they were the sort of doctors who attired themselves in the jeans and checked shirts of farm boys. One of them had come out of a consultation room to look for a chart. He was wearing a midnight-blue corduroy jacket along with his jeans. She had hoped he wouldn't turn out to be her doctor. He was attractive, certainly, but there was something really quite sad about his shoulders. He had also seemed to be somewhat shy. While he was sliding a chart into a wall of charts he had coughed briefly and she had imagined his skin: warm with fever.
When he'd said, "I wouldn't dream of it," she had secretly studied him, uneasy and puzzled, from where she was lying on the treatment table, one arm bent under her head. With his long sideburns and his long-waisted blue corduroy jacket he'd made her think of a doctor from another century. But his voice came out of the modern world and was modernly hoarse. Well, naturally; he had a cold. She had smiled up at him. "Why wouldn't you dream of it?" (She'd half-thought he would say, "Because you are too intelligent.")
"Because you are living too much up in your head."
"I'm too skeptical to be hypnotized?"
The smile in his eyes gave her full marks for naïveté if she was naïve enough to suppose that he (or anyone) would be so naïve as to label her skeptical. "Skeptical is the last thing you are. But we'll have to talk more about this the next time I see you. Which won't be as soon as I would like"-not being in sight of a calendar, he raised a bare wrist to mimic a quick, preoccupied glance at a watch-"because I'm very booked up at the moment. I think what we'll have to do right now is set up a few weekly appointments for you three or four weeks from now, after I've moved to my place out in the country."
Again she uneasily studied him. But this time she was sure her uneasiness was tipping over into skepticism. The sad thing was, he didn't see it. "I've had quite a lot of therapy already..."
There was a silence.
"Psychoanalysis," she said.
"That was for your head. This will be for your body."
"What about the insomnia," she was at last driven to ask. It was why she had come to see him. "In the meantime, I mean?"
"I'll set up a few quick appointments for you here in town-for acupuncture treatments-and I'll also teach you a few breathing techniques that might be helpful."
She wondered why he had said she wouldn't be a good candidate for hypnosis. Didn't this mean she wouldn't be willing to give herself over to the experience utterly? Unless it meant the opposite: she would go into a trance and never come back.
When it was time for her to leave, he told her that he preferred to be called Declan, not Dr. Farrell, and he pulled a map of Ontario out of a drawer to show her where he lived from May till September, on the outskirts of a small town called Ottersee. He spread the map out on the treatment table and they looked down at it together.
So there it was: unwieldy Ontario. Antelope-coloured, immense as a continent.
"Ottersee," she said, liking the sound of it. "And so are there a lot of otters out there?"
"No sea and no otters. Or at least not any more."
"Is there a bus?"
"You don't own a car?"
"No."
"I think there might be a train."
To her surprise, she discovered that she liked standing beside him. He all at once seemed like a genuine person, democratic and tactful. There was nothing lush or overly ripe about him, he was too reserved, too thoughtfully formal. But did she really want to travel so far out into the country? At the mercy of trains?
He was printing CLAIRE VORNOFF on a clean page in his notebook. "You're Russian?"
Copyright © 2000 by Elisabeth Harvor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be
mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
