Phantom Limb (2 page)

Chapter Two

It took me a few seconds to fully comprehend Lisa's words, to convince myself I'd heard her correctly. When I did, I felt a flood of conflicting emotions.

Because what she'd said certainly surprised and alarmed me, challenged me in terms of how best to help her. But to be honest—and despite my best efforts—it also angered me.

And so, without a moment's thought, I blurted out, “Why wait till seven o'clock? Why don't you just die now?”

Lisa started. “What did you say?”

My only reply was to repeat the question, since I had no goddamn idea what I was doing. Other than stalling for time.

“I said, why don't you die now?”

She stared, at a loss. “Are you trying to be funny?”

“I don't think so.”

I literally
did not know
what words were going to come out of my mouth, even as a vague, fairly ludicrous idea began forming in my mind.

“I just think, since you're planning to do it anyway later tonight, we might as well take advantage of the time we have now. Let's at least get
something
out of this session.”

“I'm fucking
serious
, Doctor. Why the hell aren't
you
?”

Her own anger flamed, sheeting her face. I ignored her.

“Would you be willing to try something?” I asked.

“That depends.” Though clearly still rankled, she seemed more curious than suspicious at this point.

Then, as reasonably as I could, I suggested that she lie down on the floor on her back.

“You're kidding, right?” Her voice grew an edge.

“Not at all.”

She gave me a grim, openly hostile look.

“Are you afraid to try it?” Pushing her now.

“I'm not afraid of anything.”

I folded my arms. “Then prove it.”

We merely stared at each other for a long moment. Then, grunting from the effort, she got off the chair and somewhat stiffly lay on her back on the office carpet.

“Okay,” I said. “You're dead.”

She frowned up at me. “I'm dead? What the fuck—?”

I didn't answer, but instead took two chairs, a small lamp table, and the piles of psych journals from different corners of the room, arranging them in a vaguely rectangular pattern around her on the floor.

“Your coffin,” I informed her, taking my seat again.

She let out a long breath. “This is such bull—”

I interrupted her. “Who's viewing you in the coffin?”

“I'm supposed to
answer
that? Christ, I
hated
this stuff in those acting classes I had to—”

“Humor me. Who's at your funeral?”

A long pause. “My family, of course. What's left of them.”

“You mean your parents? Siblings?”

“I'm an only child. As for my parents…I guess you don't read the papers, do you, Doc? Or watch TV. Or go online.”

“I know you're estranged.”

“We don't speak, if that's what you mean. They slammed the door in my face when I came crawling back to Waterson. To beg their forgiveness, try to fix things with them. Turns out, their pastor ordered them to shun me. In this day and age. Shunned! Like a fucking leper.”

I said nothing.

“I guess,” she went on, “from their point of view I
am
a leper. Corrupted in mind and body. Damned.”

She frowned. “Been that way for years. You know, back in my Hollywood days, when I started making money, I used to send them checks. They were always returned, torn into little pieces. Then, after I came back here and married old man Harland—the fifteenth-richest man in the state, by the way; you could look it up—I sent them a
humongous
check. I'm talking a shitload of money. Plus the nicest
mea culpa
letter I could write.”

“What happened?”

“Both the check
and
my letter came back, torn to pieces.” A short, bitter laugh. “Praise the Lord.”

***

Outside, the wind had risen, pushing harder against the trees. Reducing the familiar, almost comforting noise of street traffic to a thin, barely audible hum. I tried to remember if some early spring shower was in the forecast.

Lisa was rubbing her eyes, glasses riding up and down on her knuckles. Then she very deliberately adjusted them again.

I leaned forward slightly, looking down at her. “When you mentioned your family, viewing you in the coffin…”

“I was talking about my daughter Gail. She still lives back in L.A. with her husband, Tim. He's a wannabe-actor. Gay, too, but the stupid shit doesn't know it.”

Another bitter laugh. Then, without my suggesting it, she closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. She seemed to be consciously, gradually, allowing herself to “die.”

Lisa wasn't an idiot. She'd quickly realized that I'd asked her to imagine lying in her coffin so that she could make real her suicidal ideation. It allowed her defensive armor to go down, her sharp wit to take a recess. In other words, “dying” gave her the freedom to express genuine, unfiltered feelings. A passive, unhurried way to…let go.

“What's your daughter doing?” I said at last. “Right now, at your funeral?”

“Crying. Those big sobs, like when she was little. Like she can't catch her breath.”

“What about Tim?”

“Tim's looking down at me, not doing a fucking thing. But I know damned well what he's feeling.”

“What's that?”

“Guilt. And it's about time. I had to
die
before he'd finally feel it, though. Ungrateful son of a bitch.”

I saw the yearning on her face. And took a chance.

“You sure he's feeling guilty?”

A resigned sigh. “Probably not. Tim's probably
glad
I'm dead. Now he doesn't have to pretend anymore to give a shit about me, just to make sure my husband keeps paying their bills. For the new house, new car, the kids' private schools…”

She opened her eyes. “Yeah, he's glad I'm gone. Especially since he figures my husband will keep supporting them. Tim would throw a public hissy fit if the money stopped coming, and even
he's
smart enough to know Harland Industries couldn't tolerate it. All that bad publicity.”

“But you clearly see that your daughter's grieving.”

“Only because I
wanted
to.
She
doesn't give a damn about me, either. I don't believe those tears for a minute.”

“You don't?”

“Hell, no. But I…Look, truth is, I want them both to be
sorry
for how they've treated me. But you know what? I bet they won't. I bet they'll just go on, relieved not to have to deal with me anymore. Well, fuck
both
of them.”

Lisa folded her arms across her chest. A long sigh, as she stared now at the ceiling.

“Shit, I'll probably even
die
for nothing, too.”

I took a measured pause.

“Lisa, when you talked about your family viewing your coffin, you didn't mention Charles Harland. Where's your husband in this scenario?”

She smirked. “Might as well ask, ‘Where's Waldo?' I mean, you
know
the little bastard's in the picture somewhere, but…”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I'll be clear as crystal, Doc. I'm not interested in talking about my marriage. I already know what everybody thinks: I married the old guy for his money. Which I did. End of story.”

“Got it.”

For now
, I thought.

***

We spent the rest of the session this way, Lisa on her back on the floor, glancing over at me on my chair as we talked.

Despite some initial reluctance, she gave me a brief overview of her childhood history. Her father's physical and verbal abuse, interwoven with Old Testament rants about the sins of mankind and the imminent End of Days. Her mother's lifeless, submissive piety, devotion to church work, and profound, never-discussed depression. Lisa was only slightly more forthcoming about her own painful adolescence as a chubby outcast in conservative, blue-collar Waterson, Pennsylvania.

“Ever been to Waterson, Doc?”

“Afraid not.”

“Even when I was a kid, it wasn't much of a town. Nothing but prudes and rubes. County Fair was the biggest event of the year. But, hell, it's even worse now. In
this
economy? Place is like Mayberry on life support.”

I tried to interject, to ask some follow-up questions about her upbringing. But she cut me off.

“Forget all that therapy crap, Doc. Trust me, I've been through it all before, with a dozen therapists. Besides, we don't have the time.” A grim smile. “In case you forgot, we got kind of a ticking clock going here, right?”

“Right.”

In brisk, emotionless sentences, she sketched out the details of her arrival in Hollywood after leaving home at eighteen, her big acting break in a low-budget slasher film that turned into an unlikely hit, and her first marriage a year later to one of the movie's financial backers. A man twice her age, who turned out to be a drug addict, gambler, and both physically and sexually abusive.

“I'll skip the gory details,” she said, “but he was into a lot of weird, kinky shit. One of his favorite things involved duct tape and a tennis ball. He wouldn't stop 'til I screamed.”

Seeing the pained, sympathetic look that must have crossed my face, she let out a short laugh.

“Sorry if I shocked you, Doc.”

I paused, carefully considering my next words.

“Actually, I'm okay with how I reacted. I mean, how would you feel if nothing you said impacted me at all?”

She smiled. “Surprised.”

I have to admit, I was feeling a bit disoriented. Not that I hadn't dealt with suicidal patients before. But Lisa Campbell was different—sardonic, deliberately provocative. As though daring me to treat her, understand her.

No. There was something else. It occurred to me suddenly that perhaps my role in our dynamic was to
try
to help her, but
ultimately to fail
. Confirming her belief that she was somehow defective, permanently damaged. Beyond saving. Beyond hope.

However, before I could give this half-formed notion further thought, Lisa turned her face away from mine and went on with her narrative.

This time I merely listened, keeping in mind Martin Buber's sage advice: “People need to be heard, not answered.”

***

After divorcing her sadistic husband, Lisa fell into what she described as “the usual drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll” of high-octane Hollywood life.

“At first, I only slept with A-list actors. We'd go to these insane parties, girls like me. New starlets or whatever. We were all Grade-A pussy, believe me, and you just got put in the rotation. Horn-dogs like Beatty, Nicholson, Jagger—though Warren could be sweet. But it was all so fucked up….

“I remember, toward the end, waking up one morning next to
People Magazine
's
‘Sexiest Man Alive,'—at least for
that
year, you ought to see his sorry ass
now
—and we're both covered in white powder. And I'm thinking, what are we doing in the snow, are we in Aspen or someplace? Man, I never saw so much coke in my life. I was so out of it, I just lay there, naked, watching the sexiest man alive, on his hands and knees, scooping all the blow he could find into one of the hotel's laundry bags. So much for afterglow.”

Her promising acting career had suffered as well. Given her youth and inexperience, it wasn't surprising that she let her agents put her in one lurid, pointless film after another.

“But at least I got to travel, see places all over the world. I remember, on this one shoot…”

Suddenly her voice faded, and she swiveled her head, away from my sight. Gaze drifting lazily to my office window.

“What are you thinking about now, Lisa? You seem to be going off somewhere…in your head.…”

She turned back. “You mean, dissociating?”

At my quizzical look, she smiled again. “Impressed? I played a psychiatric nurse once early in my career. Before she was gang-raped and strangled, I got to do a scene where she worked with a patient who had these dissociative episodes. See? Movies
can
be educational.”

“Okay, nurse,” I said. “When you ‘dissociated,' where did you go? What were you thinking about?”

“Don't get all excited, it's not that sexy. I was thinking about the one good thing that came out of that first marriage. My daughter, Gail. A great kid, back when she
was
a kid. I used to take her on location with me. We used to—”

She stopped abruptly, blinking up at the ceiling.

“Yes?” I said quietly.

“Hey, I said forget all that therapy stuff, remember? It's not why I'm here. That was a long time ago. When Gail was a kid. When
I
was a kid. Now we're both…different. I'm just old. And she's a mean, entitled bitch with two kids of her own, stuck in L.A., married to a failed actor who works at Denny's and flirts with the busboys.” She frowned. “The only thing those two are good for is spending my husband's money. Okay, maybe it's just chump change to
him
, but still it galls me.”

Lisa reached up and removed her glasses, holding them in her hand on her stomach. Her voice was listless.

“Anyway, unless you've been living in a cave, you know the rest of the story. Stalled acting career. Short second marriage to a studio exec who was into kiddie porn. Now I was a single mother raising a rebellious teenager, dreaming of making movies again someday. Years of struggle, rejection. All that money I'd made…gone. Just gone. Then things
really
turned to shit.”