“I’m guessing something did—a recent incident, a shock, a loss. Look, I don’t really know, but what I’ve learned most after years of study and practice is that…anything is possible, and mental illness is highly subjective. An experience like the one she had as a teenager could have affected someone else entirely differently. Especially if they had treatment for it, had a supportive family, and so on.” Paul takes this in, finishes his cigarette with a deep drag, and stubs it out.
“Does the family know?” Malcolm asks.
“About this—theory? No. I don’t think so. And the husband just learned about this past incident when the detective showed him the same article. She hadn’t told him, it seems.”
“Wow, she really was…private.” Paul nods, recalling Malcolm’s sharp-edgedNot anymore.There’s an uneasy silence between them. Then Malcolm asks, “So, what’s the plan? Is this just for your own curiosity?” He sounds hopeful.
“Well, I have to write this catalog introduction for the show, and I’m sure I’ll be doing interviews. I feel like—I think I have a duty to share this with the public,” Paul says. “To give them background to the work, you know? They’ll understand the pictures better if they know what she was going through.” When he thought this all out the day before, on his walk, it felt lofty and righteous. Now it sounds craven. Malcolm stares at him for a long moment.
“I think you mean it will pack the room and sell pictures, right? I mean, I get it, I know you want the show to succeed, but you don’t have the right to share someone’spossiblepsychological condition. What would her husband think?”
“Well, he’d hate it. He’s going to despise me even more than he already does,” Paul says, giving a bitter chuckle. He tells Malcolm about Tom’s hostility toward him and how he knows Tom would never, ever accept this theory as the truth. And how enraged he’ll be if it comes out.
“So it’s simple, then: leave it out, leave it alone,” Malcolm says, waving his hand as if giving an order.
“I don’t really want to,” Paul says, heating up. “I don’t think I can. And when I tell Jahan—the gallery owner—I know he’ll want me to use it. It’s—”
“Don’t tell him, then,” Malcolm says gruffly. He’s looking at Paul with real disgust now.
“Iwilltell him,” Paul says, defiant. “Besides, like I said, I feel I have a responsibility to tell the truth.”
Malcolm scoffs. “You don’tknowthe truth, Paul. I don’t either. It’s all just speculation. It’s not like you have solid evidence. What I’ve said doesn’t amount to a diagnosis.”
“I don’t need solid evidence—I don’t need your diagnosis, either. I’m not a cop or a judge. I’m the curator of anart show. My only concern is taking care of my show. Judith’s show. Like you said yourself.”
Malcolm swallows the last of his beer and stands. “Well, count me out. Forget what I said about dissociative disorder and trauma-induced hallucinations. And for god’s sake don’t quote me. I don’t want anything to do with this.”
With that, Malcolm leaves him, dropping a few bills on the bar. He doesn’t shake Paul’s hand or wish him well or even say goodbye. Paul leans heavily into the bar, feeling soiled and gravely alone. He catches sight of himself in the mirror behind the rows of liquor bottles and winces at his asymmetrical features, the slight droop to his right eyelid, his beaky nose. His own ugliness startles him, confuses him. Hasn’t he always been handsome? He tries to smile, to make it right, and fails. He looks queasy and his features stay unbalanced, malformed.
“I’ll have another,” he tells Kent. “A double this time.”
30.
Paul wakes early to gray morning light, an upset stomach, and a pounding head. He stayed at the bar until 1 a.m., pouring liquor over the sting of Malcolm’s self-righteousness. But Paul had gotten what he needed from Malcolm, hadn’t he? Blinking awake in pain, he remembers that, clings to it. He can go to Jahan now with a newly compelling story about Judith’s death, one that should, yes,pack the room and sell pictures. But it will also enhance the experience for Judith’s viewers. He wasn’t wrong when he said that—Malcolm was just too stubborn to hear. He stares carefully in the bathroom mirror after rinsing his face and trimming his beard. Better now, isn’t it? Better than the man he saw reflected back at him in the bar mirror last night. More human, more civilized. This version of himself could debate Malcolm winningly—but the moment for that has passed, and Paul tells himself it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care.
At Doven, Jahan welcomes him warmly. Paul never tires of this happy welcome, of Jahan treating him likesomeone important. But today it unsettles him. Will Jahan view him the way Malcolm did, as a craven opportunist? He could always invent some other reason for coming in, but he finds it’s impossible; the story he came to tell fills his brain, fizzes his nerves, demands to spill out. And it’s important. Paul takes a seat across from Jahan and gives a wobbly smile.
“Is everything all right? Introduction coming along?” Jahan asks with a touch of anxiety.
“Oh, I’ve made great progress,” Paul says, relieved to tell an easy lie. It loosens him up like loosening a necktie. He begins to see a path forward, a way to play this conversation more wisely. He leans on his side of the desk and clasps his hands, warming to his task now.
“I came because I have to share something with you. Something—sensitive.” At this, Jahan hops up to close the door. When he sits again, Paul looks him in the eye.
“Judith may have killed herself.”
Jahan’s face falls in shock. He listens intently as Paul tells him everything, beginning with his trip to the Harrington PD. He details Detective Schuyler’s leading questions, his own realization of what Schuyler was intimating, and the talk he had with a “respected psychiatrist friend” who confirmed the detective’s theory as valid and even offered a diagnosis.
“My friend thinks she had dissociative identity disorder, or something like it,” Paul says, and Jahan nods as if he’s heard of it. Malcolm would be horrified, of course, but it’s not as if he’s made the diagnosis public—yet. “I couldn’t sit with this by myself any longer. I had to run it by you, had to get it out.”Like a confessional, Paul thinks. Like a man who’s come to his priest for spiritual relief and has no intention of spreading the word outside of this closed circuit.
Jahan nods again, then sits staring at a spot on the wall to the left of a towering stack of art books, papers, and manila folders.How has the man accomplished so much in such an overwhelmed office?Paul wonders idly. It’s relaxing to think of something entirely unrelated to himself or Judith or to how Jahan might react to his “confession.”
Finally, Jahan shakes his head sadly and looks again at Paul, but with a gleam in his eye.
“Poor woman. She did this to herself? Invented it somehow? And believed it, too.”
“It certainly seems that way. I had a hard time accepting it—but themore I learned, the likelier it seemed. And the likelier it seemed, the more disturbed I was.”
“Well, it’s terrible. Truly terrible. Almost worse than having a stalker in the flesh. She must have been very ill. And you say her husband didn’t know?”
