The inner room, part 2

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 The inner room, part 2  

I came a little early. I’m always worried about being late. Dr. Feight came to fetch me from his waiting room.

     And we went into the other room with the chair and the desk and the couch and the walls of books. And he said again this time, after he’d sat in the chair and I’d sat on the couch, “Tell me what’s going on.” And I said again that I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going back to work tomorrow. I had planned to since he’d said I could, but.

     He asked but what? why? had I heard something from work?

     “Yes,” I said. I had been granted a three-month leave of absence, beginning January 1, when my accumulated sick leave (excluding holidays) expired, which meant I wouldn’t go back until April – the third since the first was a Saturday and the second was my birthday. Something like that: it wasn’t entirely clear, except that I would go back on April 3rd.

     “Is that okay with you?” he asked.

     “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said.

Nobody said anything for a minute or two. Then I said: “I stayed up last night and finished the Tanizaki book, the one Uncle Albert bought in Seeville – we talked about it last time. Do you remember how it ends?”

     “Remind me,” he said.

     “It doesn’t,” I said. “The characters are still drifting, and now they’re not sure what they’re drifting toward, maybe not what they thought.”

     “Are they happy about that?”

     “You said they seemed to think that destiny might as well be kind as unkind.”

     He nodded.

     “It seems at the end as if that’s true and the reverse is true as well.”

     He nodded.

     “Destiny might as well be kind as unkind. Also, it might as well be unkind as kind.”

     He nodded.

He kept nodding, and I kept talking, except I wasn’t really talking but blathering: That’s when you put on words like layers and layers of clothing; but if you were to take off the layers, peel them away, you’d find not a naked body but air.

     Then we made another appointment for Monday – I am going to see him Mondays and Thursdays for a while. Then I came home.

Last night Uncle Albert and I went to a service of prayer for the nation, led by a rabbi, an imam, a black Baptist preacher, and the rector of the church where we’d heard Clara Bow preach. Roz went with us.

     Afterward, we all went for pizza. Roz had a glass of wine and Uncle Albert half a pint of stout; I had a Pepsi, because I can’t drink with the medicine I’m taking.

01.20.17