The Astral by Kate Christensen

Author:Kate Christensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Using my new cell phone, I called Helen’s office number the next morning and told her voice mail I needed to see her as soon as possible. She called back within the hour and gave me an appointment that same day, at five o’clock. On the phone, her voice sounded businesslike enough, revealing nothing.

I arranged to leave the lumberyard early and spent the day rehearsing what I would say to her. My plan was to spend the entire fifty minutes putting her on trial and convicting her of her unbelievable heinousness. At the end, I would inform her that I wasn’t going to pay her for the time because she owed it to me; it was the least she could do after ruining my life and my marriage and my wife’s life. Then I would walk out, my job done.

Her office was in the West Village. I walked through the small marble lobby and rode the little jewel box of an elevator up to the sixth floor. I found the door marked “Helen Vollmann, M.S.W.” and went in and sat in one of the armchairs in her tiny waiting room. I was five minutes early. While I waited, I examined the framed New Yorker covers on the wall, touched the potted succulent, and determined that it was artificial, and turned off the noise machine in order to eavesdrop on whichever client was in with her. I couldn’t hear anything, so I turned it back on. I yawned and scratched my earlobe and stared hard at the most odiously whimsical of the New Yorker covers, a pigtailed little girl on roller skates gliding through the Metropolitan Museum, gazing up at an empty suit of armor.

I was well aware of the fact that every one of Helen’s clients saw her voluntarily, knowing full well that everyone else they knew was seeing her, too. This didn’t excuse anything, it just made me even more wary of her. My friends were not stupid or naïve people. Any harm Helen caused couldn’t have come about if they hadn’t all given her so much power. And these many crimes I wanted to accuse her of were no doubt justified, as far as she was concerned, by the fact that her self-romanticizing professional unconventionality put her beyond the normal ethical boundaries of therapy, such as they were, and allowed her to do whatever the hell she wanted. This must have been the thing they all liked so much about her.

But, naïve as it may have been to feel this way, it truly shocked me that Helen had commanded Luz to disregard irrefutable evidence to the contrary and to persist in believing that Marion and I were sleeping together. And it had always shocked me that Helen had agreed to see an entire group of friends, including several sets of married couples, as well as people they’d been involved with before they got married and others who had had affairs with members of these couples. Obviously, she was a bat out of hell, and someone had to stop her.

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