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By Root 610 0

the therapist spent accusing her of trying to overthrow male authority. “You make me sound like the French Revolution,” she retorted. The therapist kept tossing chocolate-coated coffee beans in his mouth as he suggested that anger at her husband was actually fear of the phallus. Annie said no, it was actually anger at her husband. He suggested that she appeared to be sitting on great reserves of anger; it seemed likely that her father, her “uncle,” or her Lesbian aunt, or some combination, had abused her and she’d completely repressed the knowledge. Annie said that such a supposition was unchallengeable but bogus. Her father’s only abuse had been leaving her alone. Sam and Clark’s only abuse had been their rarely doing the same.

As she strode out of the therapist’s office, Annie said she wouldn’t be back. One hundred and forty dollars an hour was too much to pay to watch somebody eat candy.

“I do it for the caffeine,” he said.

“It’s too much to pay to watch someone eat a pound of caffeine.”

But alone later with Amy Johnson, in her neat, spare apartment, Annie found herself so upset that she called Georgette at one in the morning. “Be my friend and my therapist both? We could do it officially on the phone. I’ll pay you by the hour.”

“At one in the morning? Not on your salary.”

“This fat jerk said I had a fear of men.”

Georgette laughed. Men, she said, were the least of Annie’s fears. What scared Annie was losing rank, not being in charge.

Annie asked: But had she left Brad to forestall his leaving her?

“Possibly.” Georgette thought it just as likely that Annie had left Brad because she’d found him in their bed banging the Implant Slut with the ridiculous name of Melody.

“Good answer,” said Annie.

“A good answer is the answer you want,” Georgette said. “Am I going to confuse friendship with therapy and tell my best friend she has repressed her pathological dread of abandonment by leaving her husband but not divorcing him, which frees her from the threat of intimacy with another man? That a reaction formation to male irresponsibility has produced in her a pattern of obsessive-compulsive over-achievement within a sexist patriarchal hierarchy like the U.S. Navy where she is addicted to a steady supply of high grades, top prizes, and speed records? So, yes, she does want to overcome and supersede men. But she also wants to overcome and supersede women. She is an equal opportunity superseder. And she has a serious eating disorder. Am I going to say any of that, even when she wakes me up at one in the morning? How many best friends have I got?”

Annie asked, “What serious eating disorder?”

Georgette made a spluttering phht phht noise. “You say the collapse of your marriage was devastating and yet you never huddled in a fetal position for days, or went on a binge of sex with strangers, or faced the look on the checkout woman’s face when you rolled six gallons of ripple ice cream onto the conveyer belt. Did you? Did you ever gain, or for that matter lose, a fucking pound?”

Annie assured her friend that she was a mess and she was getting a divorce.

“You haven’t even formally filed. Why is this divorce so slow and messy when you’re so fast and in charge?”

“Okay, Georgette, are we going to talk ‘messy’? You’ve still got boxes of unsent Christmas cards on your dining room table and it’s March!”

“Aha, this is why friends can’t do therapy on friends. My patients haven’t seen my table, much less my closet.”

“You haven’t seen your closet yourself, not in years. You couldn’t.”

“You can trash my closet all you want and you still won’t be divorced.”

Annie assured Georgette that the latest delay on the final proceedings (she was legally separated, don’t forget) had to do only with lawyers stalling to pad their bills; she would be finished with her marriage to Brad by the end of next week. “By Bastille Day, Gigi, je serai en liberté.” She then changed the subject. “I want you to meet my neighbor Trevor. For his last vacation, he went on a dig to Baalbek.”

“What does Trevor think about how long your divorce is taking?”

“Nothing.