The Shrink, by Linda Boroff

Her mother had come out to California from Tennessee, a new widow with six ragged kids, a cast iron skillet, and an abiding faith in “Jaysus” and hard work. They had found a cabin in the Santa Cruz redwoods, and the mother opened a dressmaking business. The children raised chickens and gardened.

I see. 

And went to school of course. Nobody had appreciated the virtues of an education more than Ma, who had none. Mrs. Janss smiles a little, remembering “How It Was.” They had had a nice poignant, ethical childhood, skinny blond urchins out in the ferns and mulch, nursing injured birds and pressing leaves between sheets of waxed paper.

I nod. 

“Mrs. Janss, reveries are not what we’re after here. A murder has been committed.”

Oh. She hunkers down meekly in her chair and ruminates for a few seconds on what it is I want to hear.

“We were bound to go wrong, some of us,” she finally comes up with, “Ma being so strict and pious.” I raise my left eyebrow, a command to elaborate. My pipe has gone out, which is a fortuitous break. While I fumble with tobacco and matches, she will bare her soul. They tend to reveal more when they think you’re a little preoccupied, believing they can perhaps sneak something past you.

Six months ago I would have been mad for this file. Now I find this damn woman is putting me to sleep. In fact, I can’t figure out why John Beeson had anything to do with her in the first place, unless he really was into her daughter too. Hell, who wouldn’t be, faced with that choice? But of course Stern grabbed the daughter before she was even booked, which is his prerogative of course, as head of Psych Services. So as usual I’ll have to await his pleasure before I find out what was really going on, probably in some gruesome after-hours meeting with my stomach growling and all the secretaries hanging around choosing up sides in the drama.

It’s during afternoons like this that private practice starts to look inviting, a modest little gig down in Carmel-by-the-Sea: tippling housewives, writer’s block, a teenage suicide threat or two. If I could only score one of those offices by the beach with the Australian ferns in front, some nice wicker furniture, lots of batik and blown glass; a seascape, of course. Still, it’s not a good time to open any kind of business, and it’s taken me nine years to get to even this position, which is not something to throw away lightly. In a bigger county like San Francisco or Alameda I might still be processing food stamp applications. I’ve heard of that happening.

“Mrs. Janss, when was the first time your daughter threatened Beeson?”

“Well, she didn’t threaten him exactly. He more like threatened her. They were in a fight over something and he said he was going to knock her teeth down her throat if she didn’t shut up.”

“And what was her response?”

“She said if he ever touched her again she’d kill him.”

“Again?”

“Oh, he’d shoved her around a few times, nothing big, you know, and once he backhanded her. 

She said her lip was cut, but I didn’t see nothing. But they was both so het up I called police. And then the D.A., you know, Mr. Tennant, was going to file against him for assault and battery, but I dropped the charges.”

“Why?” 

Now the tears.

“I loved him. He was on probation already for drunk and disorderly, and well, he’d had a few that night, not so that he was drunk, but you could smell him. It wasn’t fair. He’d lost a good contract that morning, he did short-distance hauling, you know.” I nod. “And it was just natural for him to be upset. And she used to backtalk him all the time. Never showed any respect. I guess it was my fault. I never should have let him come around so much. The children, you know, he never got on with them. Course Sam’s in the Navy coming up a year. So it was Penny who bore the brunt.”

“The police report says John Beeson was actually living with you.”
“Well just for a few weeks till he got another place. He had a hard time keeping up his rent over on Ocean View what with business being so slow. He hardly had a business left.” This laborious recounting takes its toll. She becomes incoherent, drowning in tears and phlegm.

I am perplexed. How this birdy, menopausal woman with her home permanent and pink Wal-Mart double-knit pants could be the center of such a vortex of emotion is beyond me. They must all do it for kicks, those rednecks. What the hell else do they have to do but drink, watch TV, smoke meth, screw and murder each other?

It has begun to rain, and the windows in my office are steaming up. Mrs. Janss is now crying quietly into what must be a handful of damp lint.
“Feel free to use the tissues, Mrs. Janss.” I push the box at her and she gropes for it. Middle-aged women usually try to cover their contorted faces, which touches me. Her daughter was in the office yesterday, shrieking like Medea and snotting on her sleeve. Nobody could get any work done, but Stern won’t prescribe tranquilizers for kids. So two secretaries couldn’t take the noise and went home. And here I sit with the Kenninger tape untyped and my ass on the line for about the third time this month. I wonder how Janss is going to react if she discovers that Beeson was dodling her daughter? That might get interesting.

“Let’s call a halt,” I tell her wearily. “It’s going on two hours.” She flashes me a look of sympathy over the tissue and mutters something that sounds like “spectacle of myself.” I have to admit that the woman has a certain self-effacing warmth, a quality that all losers seek out instinctively in their lovers. It’s not unusual to see such a person hosting several losers at once, all of them plump and smug. The situation may even give the illusion of symbiosis for a time, but losers are greedy for losing, and one or more of them will eventually devour the host.

Mrs. Janss and I rise in unison, joints popping, and stretch. A weary physical intimacy has grown up between us in these few exhausting sessions, the immodest, apathetic intimacy of hospital patients.

We walk out together, limp and oily; Mrs. Janss thanks me effusively in front of the whole office. The secretaries’ faces are so varied in expression it is difficult to believe that they are all looking at the same person.

The consensus in the clerical pool is that Mrs. Janss is a slave to her own foolish heart. This would ordinarily command sympathy if not for the fact that her two children suffered both mentally and physically at the hands of her now deceased paramour, a thick, vulgar mesomorph from the San Joaquin Valley, violent and stupid; a drifter whose blood consisted of equal parts bourbon and testosterone and who undeniably needed dying, as they say.

At any rate, the controversy over the Janss case has created profound schisms among the secretaries, and a long-established pecking order has disintegrated. I observe ungracious xeroxing behavior, feverish tattling and a scowling, purse-lipped efficiency that is frankly terrifying.

The older secretaries condemn Mrs. Janss with a wide-nostriled relish that would have done justice to Madame DeFarge. The middle-aged secretaries, several divorced themselves, identify with her and resent the droopy-lidded daughter, whom they suspect of seduction. The young secretaries are faintly puzzled at the idea of people that old still doing it so avidly and are staunchly convinced of the daughter’s innocence in matters sexual if not in matters homicidal.

A fortyish administrative assistant now rises, brow quivering, casts a lofty glance of empathetic hauteur at the older secretaries, and proudly marches up to Mrs. Janss with a white pleated paper cup of water and a tissue for the road. Playing Melanie to Bonnie Janss’s Scarlett, she puts an arm around the miscreant and lovingly escorts her to the door, then resumes her seat, smiling beatifically.

“I’m going home,” I announce, feeling considerably upstaged. I see a few shrugs of acknowledgment as the office returns to business. Stern’s door has been closed all afternoon. An X-ray would reveal him deeply engrossed in Match.com. 

Two hugely pregnant women who look like mother and daughter lounge against the green metal wall that defines the food stamp area and give me a casual once-over as I pass crabwise, manila folders in hand.

They see a smallish bureaucrat in the corduroy sport coat of the perennial graduate student, wearing an ochre-colored goatee beneath pale lips and a fleshy retrousse nose; a man of pretensions and elaborate assertion fantasies, unfree, a snob. I know what I am.

These women of limp translucent hair and broad freckled faces mock my whole existence with their careless, bestial fecundity. They are barefoot; hippie women from communes in the hills around Santa Cruz, flaunting elaborate, cryptic jewelry. The younger has a tiny butterfly tattooed on her left cheekbone. Eye-to-eye with her, I whiff superheated patchouli oil and become dizzy with sudden lust. My neat loafer nearly catches on a pant cuff and I am ejected from the office on a gust of her poorly suppressed laughter.

Out in the rainy parking lot, I hyperventilate enthusiastically, but the air is grim and muggy, unrefreshing. I have a sense of foreboding and remember that I am about to confront my wife again about the MasterCard. Recently, she quit her job at a local title company and has begun spending money with a vicious joy that can foreshadow only the end of my marriage. Her extravagance is sensuous, precise and sadistic, and when I pay the bills each month, as best I can, she watches me through narrow eyes of loathing. It has not been a good year for Beth: migraines, a possible miscarriage. A flirtation with Vicodin was headed off thanks to my own counseling expertise and familiarity with support modalities here in the county.

A wan finger of sun creeps out of the dismal sky and meekly warms my face through the car window. The traffic is heavy for a weekday, and my ambivalence toward my wife resolves itself into impatience and disgust. She has no sense of fair play. Her tactics are those of the weak, the powerless. I turn right and see her walking down our block toward me, away from the house. She is wearing her new 1940’s style trench coat that cost fifteen hundred dollars. At the sight of me she gives a start of surprise, then rolls her eyes. That does it. I slam on my brakes.

“Get in, please. I’d like a word with you.”

“Oh shit. What are you doing home so early?” As she leans toward me, the coat gapes open, revealing a black lace bra.

“I have just finished a marathon session with a woman whose lover was done in with a cast-iron skillet wielded by her thirteen-year-old daughter. I feel I’ve put in a full day.”

“Oh. Charming.” Beth’s attention is arrested. “Why do you think she did it, the kid?”

“Because she wanted the man dead, I suppose. He may have been molesting her.”

“Or the other way around.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your boss thinks it was the other way around.”

“How the hell do you know what Stern thinks?”

“Why? Because he’s my lover. He’s quite fascinated by the case, actually. He says Penny Janss is sociopathic. Beeson was madly in love with her and gave her all of his money, which she used to help her teenage boyfriend capitalize his heroin dealership. They were a real little pair of entrepreneurs, until Beeson found out and threatened to blow the whistle to mama. So Penny cried molestation and cracked poor John Beeson over the head with the most lethal weapon she could lay her hands on. Spoiled a good fried chicken dinner too. Nothing fries chicken better than a cast iron skillet, you know. That’s what Leo says.” Beth’s eyes are glassy, darting about the inside of my car. “Do you still want me to get in?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I just left you about ten minutes ago. Leo is meeting me at The Crow’s Nest for a drink and then we’re going to find me an apartment.” She glances up and down the block. “Please don’t make a scene.”

My will gleams out at her like a laser. In her eyes are fear and bravado and something else: Stern. I can see him coaching her, worrying out and dealing with all possible reactions on my part. I shake my head. 

“I’m not about to.”

“I’m so glad. Goodbye, Henry.” Beth steps neatly around the front of the car and hurries off, heels tapping. Dazed, I watch her in the rearview mirror. About every five steps, she gives a little gallop of jubilation. My wrath, my indignation, even my sense of betrayal are neutralized by that leap. Numb, I start my car and proceed down the block.

Beth has left the curtains open and the lights on. The door gapes. Two laptops have been pushed into the living room in front of the giant picture window, where they bracket my Bang and Olufson earphones and my new digital camera. An open jewelry box beckons with a cornucopia of bling—Beth’s gold anniversary watch, her engagement ring, and several pieces I don’t recognize. I park and put my face in my hands, feeling disbelief, remorse and, oddly, something akin to awe. 

Though I am not much of a drinker, I decide to begin my divorce in traditional masculine fashion. 

The bar I choose must be remote, quiet, neglected and grim. I want no brittle singles or fleshy insurance salesmen or anonymous civil servants like myself to witness my grief. I don’t want flirtatious waitresses to distract me. I want sticky formica, a jukebox and oblivion. Down on Pacific Avenue, I find the place, next door to a low-ball card room. I park in front and walk in.

The bartender, whose brow is set in a permanent furrow of commiseration, nods to me, and I hail him cordially, as my executioner. At the end of the bar I notice a lone woman in pink pants gazing dolefully into a Tequila Sunrise. It is Bonnie Janss, and when she sees me, she breaks into a real smile, which quickly becomes a look of concern. She rises and comes over, taking my hand in both of hers.

“Oh Mrs. Janss,” I stammer and burst into tears.

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