Gelsey acknowledged Tracy's hurt. "I'm sorry about that. I told you, I've got problems."
"Who doesn't? But you gotta admit it's a barrier. We're supposed to be friends. But I don't rate enough to know your phone number or even your address."
"It's not a question of how you rate."
"What is it, then? Personal privacy? Screw that! ' I got none. Diana's on my back about everything, controlling everything. Like we all belong to her. Like we're all her… you know, slaves."
"Well-?"
Tracy finished off her fruit juice. "Think I don't know it? You were one, too, before you ran away. So, how's it feel to be free, girl?
Lucky you!"
"Try it sometime. You'll like it," Gelsey said gently.
They parted on the street. Traffic was heavy on upper Broadway. Gelsey saw bits of herself reflected in chrome parts on rapidly passing cars.
"Same time next Friday?" Tracy asked.
Gelsey nodded. "It's fun to work out with you."
"Except for the gripe session afterwards, right?" Tracy beamed, then glanced at her watch. "Shit! I'm late. Diana'll kill me." The two young women embraced.
"Take care," Gelsey said, and then, after Tracy flagged a cab: "Score big! Good luck!"
Mirrors: There were so many on Broadway, Gelsey couldn't have avoided them if she'd tried. They surrounded shop windows, or, narrow and vertical, were set in the panels between stores. Stainless surfaces, hubcaps, buildings with skins made of metal or glass-sometimes the whole man-made world seemed to consist of reflections and fleeting surfaces.
Nature, too, provided mirrors-puddles, lakes, pools of still water.
Gelsey knew there was hardly a place on earth where one could not turn and find a double of oneself.
Mirrors: at times they seemed to swallow her being, suck her deep into their world of reverse. She knew she should regard them as her friends, for they offered her a place to hide. She recognized that they could be her enemies, too. The things she saw in them were frightening, terrifying sometimes.
Dr. Zimmerman's office was in a Victorian brownstone on a shady, quiet street between Columbus and Central Park West. Gelsey walked there from the health club, ever watchful, wary of running into someone she might have hit on in a bar.
That was the risk she ran whenever she ventured into Manhattan-not robbery or rape, but recognition by a mark. Her wigs provided some disguise, but there were men, she knew, who would never forget her eyes.
A confrontation with one could be disastrous. Whenever she walked the streets she was on her guard.
There were two buttons marked "Zimmerman" on the panel. The upper one rang in the doctor's residence; the lower one alerted him in his ground-floor consulting room. She pressed the. lower one then waited, nervous, hand poised on the doorknob, because Dr. Zimmerman had a singular response to entreaties to enter his domain. He would first ring back fast, so quickly a visitor would barely have time to push open the door. Then, after several seconds (maddeningly, the interval varied), he would send forth a second, longer peal, which would echo in the visitor's ears long after entry.
Gelsey always tried to make it in on the first buzz, but she rarely succeeded. This bell game, as she thought of it, was a strange little quirk on the doctor's part that either irritated her or warmed her heart, depending on her mood.
"Hello, Gelsey!" Dr. Zimmerman spoke her name even before he craned his head into the little waiting room. Today he was feeling affable; sometimes his greeting was more restrained.
Gelsey rose and followed him into his office. She detested the waiting room, with its bland wallpaper and disheveled magazines, some of which she'd seen grow ragged over the year she'd been in treatment. But she hated the room most for the tawdry dime-store mirror on its wall, provided, she supposed, for patients who needed to compose themselves after particularly intense sessions of psychotherapy.
Dr. Zimmerman's office, however, was something else, an extraordinary world. Gelsey loved it on account of his collection of artifacts of primitive cultures mounted on the walls. African ritual objects made of wood and copper; Oceanian fetish items; Native American headdresses; an array of African and South Sea island masks. "Totem and taboo, mirrors of the unconscious self-that's what they're all about," Dr. Z would say, sweeping his arm expansively, his gray goatee wiggling.
Mirrors: There it was again, that damn word, the concept of reflection and reverse that consumed her, ruled her life. She had come to Dr.
Zimmerman to seek escape from her obsession only to find that the words mirrors and mirroring were essential to his discourse.
"How're things going?" Dr. Z's standard opening; he usually glanced away from her when he said it. He was a medium-sized man, stout, bald on top, with well-groomed gray hair on either side. He had a confidence and composure that made her doubt she could take him in a bar. Just the thought of such a battle made her shake. "Well, I keep looking into mirrors," she said. "Nothing new about that." Dr. Zimmerman smiled.
"It's what you see in them that should concern us."
"I see my dream-sister."
"Sure. Your twin. Your opposite. Forever separate yet forever bound.
That's your fantasy, Gelsey. The mirror fantasy equals the double delusion. It's a beautiful equation. So symmetrical. And so… convenient for you, too." Dr. Z smiled again-a little smugly, Gelsey thought. Oh, he was sly, the good doctor, with his perceptions and equations, devised to penetrate her defenses, disrupt her neurotic ways of coping with the world and set her on the high straight road to mental health. Of course her dream-sister was a "double delusion." Of course it had been engendered by having spent her childhood above a mirror maze.
She craved more, much more-a deeper, more liberating analysis.
She looked at Dr. Z. She wondered sometimes if his glib responses were devised to force her to peer more deeply into herself, or if they were nothing more than the mutterings of a lazy, aging analyst.
"This twin of yours who writes in mirror-reverse-she's not just your mirror-sister, Gelsey-she's your inner sister, your shadow."
That was sort of new. He had talked a lot about her shadow," but had not offered that equation before. Perhaps Dr. Z, sensing her frustration, was going to give her her money's worth today.
"Shakespeare wrote: ' thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." Do you see how it might apply?"
"You're saying if I own up to my dream-sister, accept her as my shadow, then-l-what?"
"You can eat her. Eat your shadow. Swallow her up. Ultimately that's the goal of therapy." Dr. Zimmerman paused. "Tell me something-when you come back from one of your expeditions and look at yourself in the mirror, what do you feel? Please note before you answer that I didn't ask you what you see." She thought about it. "I think I feel a little surprised."
"Why?"
"I think it's because I look the same. As if the experience hasn't changed me a bit. As if the mirror-" She stopped. There was an important idea floating in her head, but she couldn't quite catch hold of it.
"Does the mirror reject you?"
Gelsey stared at an Indonesian mask. She shook her head.
"Defy you?"
"No."
"Try to describe it?"
She shook her head again.
"Perhaps it just stares at you. A blank, unforgiving face."
"Yes, it stares. But I don't want forgiveness, Doc. No, it's something else."