Wide Blue Yonder (22 page)

“Of course.” Waiting, visibly, for her to say more.

“No, that’s really it. I want you to hypnotize me into being happy.”

He was doing his professional best to understand. “What behaviors are preventing you from achieving happiness?”

“None. There’s nothing in the world keeping me from being happy except me.”

The hypnotist guy—she decided that was how she would think of him—considered this. He was a neat, slim young man, prematurely balding. There was something reassuring about the pale dome of his forehead. It was reminiscent of laboratories and operating rooms, of scientific industry and verifiable knowledge. Although his pleasant office was a marvel of indirect lighting, earth tones, and framed landscape photographs, wheat fields and ocean waves, chosen for their pretty, restfully vapid effect, Elaine supposed, she wasn’t ready to be lulled into any peaceful, prehypnotic mood. She felt anxious, and more than a little silly. She said, “I know you don’t dangle a gold watch in my face, at least I think I know that, but I hope you don’t mind my asking, what is it exactly that you do?”

“I gradually relax you so that you lose that layer of conscious attitudes, defenses, and anxieties. Then I can speak directly to your mind. Don’t worry, you’ll be entirely aware the whole time. I won’t make you cluck like a chicken or anything.”

“Thank you.”

“But let me try and clarify. How do we define happiness, how do we quantify it? Say we undertake a course of therapy. How do we know if it’s been successful?”

“I’m not sure,” Elaine admitted. “I don’t know if happiness is just the absence of unhappiness, or if it’s something more positive. And I suppose there’s a kind of continuum, from contentment through happiness to ecstasy. I’d settle for the middle of the spread. You know?” The hypnotist guy’s bald head stayed immobile. She tried again. “By any rational, objective standards, I have a good life. There are things I might wish were different, but honestly,
I have nothing to complain about. I just want to turn some knob in my brain so that I can appreciate it without worrying that it’s not enough, or that some disaster’s going to come along and punish me for enjoying myself.”

“If you feel you might be clinically depressed …”

Elaine shook her head. “No. I’m discontented. I’m apprehensive. There’s a difference.”

“All right. How does being discontented and apprehensive feel? Physically, I mean.”

She considered this. “Dense. Slow. Droopy.”

“So we need to speed you up some.”

“You could throw in a little weight loss too, if you wanted,” said Elaine, trying to make a joke out of it. She was never going to admit to anyone that she was doing this.

The hypnotist guy laughed. “Why don’t you close your eyes.”

“What, right now?” She thought there should be more prelude or preparation or something. It was alarming.

“Sure, right now. Give it a whirl.”

With her eyes shut she felt even more ill at ease and unhypnotizable, on guard against whatever she irrationally imagined was about to attack. There was a space of silence filled with her own cautious breathing. Then another silence. Elaine was tempted to cheat and sneak a look. Then his voice crept into the silence and took everything over. She hadn’t remarked his voice as anything special before, but now it seemed enormous, as full of growling power as a car engine yet subtle as smoke.

“I want you to lean back until your head rests against the cushion. Yes. Now some deep breaths, each one starting as far down as you can reach. And every time you let one out, I want you to feel yourself getting a little lighter. A little freer. Each breath a little slower. That’s good. And Elaine?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t try so hard.”

From there he asked her to imagine herself walking down a long flight of stairs, and at every step she was to relax a little more. That was fine, that was the sort of thing Elaine expected. Nothing flashy. Relax her toes, her ankles, her knees, and so on. She kept thinking how normal she felt, how she was probably one of those people who couldn’t be hypnotized. Pelvis, ribcage, shoulders. The stairs led down through a kind of tunnel, arched with brick or stone, and at its end was a floating, green-gold light, indistinct but promising the rarest sort of beauty, a garden, perhaps. Or something less contained than a garden, some impossible storybook landscape whose forms and colors were as delicate and improbable as if they were made of blown glass. The colors washed into paler and paler shades, into white. That floating light was joy, and each step on the staircase brought you a little closer. The important thing was to realize that the staircase went on forever.

“Elaine? You can open your eyes now.”

She couldn’t at first. She had forgotten how. When she did open them there was a moment of disappointment so pure she could have wept, at being back in the normal world. The pretty office seemed harsh and wrong, or she herself was wrong, until some lens slipped back into place and she saw things as she always had.

“How do you feel?”

Elaine raised both hands and touched her face with her fingers. It felt cool. “All right. I guess I’m all right. Was that it? Was I hypnotized?”

“Yes ma’am. I’d say you were.” His pale forehead nodded. He seemed pleased.

“It wasn’t exactly what I expected. It was … Was that you talking the whole time? I wasn’t sure.”

“That depends on what you heard.”

The hypnotist guy smiled and picked up a brochure from his desk. “If you’d like to consider a complete course of treatments, this will give you information about fees and payment options.”

She walked out into the ordinary afternoon, which either was no longer ordinary or else it never had been. Surely he couldn’t have hypnotized the whole world? There was an edge of almost fluorescent green to the trees where the late sunlight hit them. Since the heat had broken, it was now possible to stand outside without making immediate plans to get under cover. An invisible bird called from a tree, its voice a liquid question. An airplane passed overhead, as slow as any bee, arcing downward to land.

When she started the car and attended to all its mechanical demands, gear shift, parking brake, accelerator, she had to do so consciously, as if she had been stripped of some bodily habit that allowed her to do such things without thinking. The Service Engine Soon light went on, winking at her like a joke she’d heard a dozen times and was still supposed to laugh at. Right then and there she decided she was going to trade the car in.

T
eeny had left a message on Elaine’s answering machine. This in itself was an unheard-of thing. And Teeny’s voice was strained and hesitant, even filtered through electricity: Would Elaine mind calling her? Soon?

Perhaps something had happened to Frank, but no, she wouldn’t be on the A-list even for drastic news. She tried to think if she’d inadvertently offended them. There was always the Harvey situation, but that was hardly the sort of thing Teeny would get audibly distressed over.

Teeny must have been expecting her because even her hello
was abrupt. “Elaine, thank God. I was hoping you could stop by for a little while this afternoon.”

“Is something wrong?” Elaine asked, concerned, but annoyed at all the drama.

“Is Josie there?”

“Yes, she’s in the shower. What about Josie?”

“Oh, I’d really prefer to sit down with you. Just a little heart-to-heart. How’s two o’clock?”

“You and Frank and me?”

“Frank’s playing golf. This is just girl talk.”

Teeny must have had one of her soap operas in mind, where people had nothing better to do than trek around having heavy conversations. What in the world had Josie done anyway, and why would Teeny care? Josie wasn’t going with them to Aspen, but they’d settled all that, hadn’t they? Had there been some kind of flare-up?

As soon as Elaine agreed to see Teeny, she regretted it. It was Sunday and she’d planned on catching up on her bookkeeping. When Josie came slouching downstairs later, her hair sleek and wet, Elaine tried to gauge the chances of getting any information out of her. Josie responded to Elaine’s good morning with a noise that did not require her to open her mouth. She communed with the refrigerator for a time, snared an orange soda, and headed back upstairs.

So Elaine dressed in her smartest black linen jacket and pants, hating that she was dressing up for Teeny, hating even more that Teeny would be decked out in something preposterous but four sizes smaller. She wondered if the hypnotist guy could help her with Teeny, like make her invisible. Simple posthypnotic suggestion.

One hour, she told herself, backing out of the driveway. No, forty-five minutes, and she begrudged even that much. Frank and
Teeny lived in Panther Hills, in the new house Frank had built to go along with his new life. Elaine would have liked to say the house was vulgar but in fact it was a very nice house, she would have liked to live there herself if there weren’t places like India in the world, or, more to the point, if she were someone who could ignore the existence of places like India.

Frank employed a landscaping service so that laborers came out to plant and water and tend to the weeping cherry and daylilies and ornamental grasses. The house itself was low and expansive. The front door was a marvel of inlaid wood and asymmetrical glass. The doorbell had a sound like a Buddhist temple gong. Elaine listened to it echo through the vasty corridors of the game room, sunroom, master suite with full-size fireplace, and so on. Elaine had only come here to deposit Josie or pick her up, back when Josie was making her increasingly reluctant weekend visits. Once, when Frank wasn’t home, Teeny had given her a tour, and Elaine had admired the hand-painted Portuguese tile, granite slab kitchen countertops, had even been granted a peek at the enormous, pilow-decked, salmon-and-cream California king bed where Teeny and Frank disported themselves. She had liked Teeny better for showing her the bed, for not even thinking there was anything indelicate about doing so.

Elaine rang the bell again and the echoes died away. Just as she was about to leave, annoyed, the door opened and Teeny, already talking before she was visible, said, “Sorry sorry sorry, I was all the way back in the laundry room,” as if that was a reasonable place to be when you were expecting guests, then poked her head around the door and waved Elaine inside.

“Thanks so much for coming.” Teeny’s tone was serious, even hushed. Some of her tawny hair was clipped into two peculiar, asymmetrical tufts, one over her left eyebrow, one over her right ear. She was wearing a lime green tank top and a short white
pleated skirt, red-and-green-striped jute sandals. She resembled something Elaine couldn’t quite put a name to. A tennis-playing parrot, maybe. “Would you like a drink? I’ve got stuff for margaritas.”

Elaine said No thank you, and Teeny offered iced tea, white wine, Kahlúa, milk, diet Sprite. “Iced tea,” said Elaine, resigning herself to raising a glass with Teeny. Teeny led her to one of the rooms they’d run out of names for. Gallery? Porchette? Garden nook? It was furnished with pale green wicker and glass-topped tables and Elaine took a seat opposite one of Frank’s discarded beige polo shirts, which she eyed mistrustfully, as if it might be capable of speech. Beyond the French doors was the pool, with its hallucinatory blue water, and Frank’s enormous gas grill, suitable for preparing haunches of beef. Elaine wondered if they entertained much. Frank had never been the entertaining type.

Teeny returned with the iced tea on a tray, whisked the shirt away with an apologetic fuss, and waited until Elaine had raised her drink to say, “You know Josie was over here last night.”

Elaine said she wasn’t aware of that. Goddamn the girl.

“Oh, yes. She asked if there was a time she and a couple of her girlfriends could use the pool without disturbing us. And since we were going to Joliet with the Rhineharts to the riverboat casino, we said sure, come on over. Although Frank would appreciate it if Josie wanted to spend some time
with
him.”

“Of course,” Elaine murmured, bracing herself for whatever was to come. But Josie was safe at home. The house was still standing. What, then?

“So she came over to get the house key and the security code and she was as sweet as pie, and promised they wouldn’t make any sort of mess, or get into the liquor, and I have to say she was as good as her word. We’d left some Cokes and chips out for them, and they washed the glasses and put the garbage away and
hung up the towels. But when we got home, and were getting ready for bed, I turned the covers down and there was no bottom sheet on the mattress.”

“Oh, dear,” said Elaine, feeling grateful, mostly. She’d been expecting something like stolen jewelry.

“I found the sheet in the dryer, And I know if it was my daughter having some kind of lesbian affair, I would definitely want to hear about it.”

Elaine didn’t laugh because there wasn’t anyone to laugh along with her. One-on-one against Teeny’s belligerent seriousness, she wasn’t sure she’d prevail. “Did you tell Frank any of this?”

“Oh Lord no. I had to pretend the housekeeper messed up.”

“You know it’s possible it wasn’t a girl she had over here, but some boy. In fact it’s more than likely. I’m sorry about the sheets.”

Teeny’s face pulled in two directions, like her sprouting hair, relief and indignation. “A boy?”

“I agree, it’s still distressing. Just in a different way.”

“She said Jennifer and Tammy. I distinctly remember.”

“Yes, they’re the usual alibi. If you’d like me to talk to her …”

Teeny shook her head. “You’d think they could just do it in a
car
like everybody else.”

“It was the pool. They wanted the pool. Aren’t you glad you don’t have a teenager?”

Teeny said, “Well, even if it was a boy …”

“I still would have wanted to know. Thank you.” Teeny had some apricot-colored makeup coating her face and throat. Elaine hadn’t noticed it at first, but now she was fascinated by the way it floated over Teeny’s features like a mask. There were orangy deposits at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Something stretched and frayed about the flesh beneath her chin. Teeny was twelve years younger than Elaine. Frank’s frisky filly. Teeny hadn’t caused the breakup of the marriage; she’d been more of a coup de grace. Now she was already showing signs of high
mileage. But it was too easy to make fun of Teeny. It always had been. Besides, she had Josie to worry about. Josie and her new mystery swain. Elaine had no clue as to who he might be and that in itself meant trouble. Whoever he was, she’d gone to a lot of elaborate care to play house with him. Elaine only wished she could be there to watch when Josie finally remembered the sheet in the dryer.