Your father made you ' for it'; you are so seductive that these men must ' for it,' too. Your father abused you on rainy days; you feel compelled to do these things on rainy nights. There are other parallels and they are all so clear that I am… just a little bit suspicious. The unconscious does not act with such precision. I believe there is another level of meaning hidden beneath this much-too-regular symmetry. Our task is to find it. I'm not certain yet, but I believe the key lies in the maze. I believe there is more down there than you're telling me, more than you may know yourself This Minotaur, for instance. Who or what is it? Who or what does it represent? You look at yourself in mirrors all the time. Now I think you must ask yourself what exactly you are looking for. To put it another way, you must learn to look beyond your own reflection to something deeper, hidden, perhaps behind the mirrors.
Then, I believe, you will see your real self." He paused. He was looking at the little clock across the room, the clock that told him when a session was finished without his having to glance too obviously at his watch.
"Time is up. You know that as a therapist I don't pass judgment on my patients. But I'd be remiss if I didn't say something to you now-speaking as one most concerned about your welfare. I feel I know you well, Gelsey. I know you have good character. The terrible thing about compulsions is the way they force us to do things we know are wrong. You have a strong moral compass. So, please, my dear-I urge you with all my heart-please follow it."
He stood to signal the session was over. His parting words at the door were simple: "I believe we will look back on this session as having been very important for us both. Next time we will explore the Minotaur-who or what you think you saw in the maze. Perhaps that imaginary creature is the key to your locked-up memories."
When she left, the tears were back in her eyes. They clouded her vision even on the street. Dr. Zimmerman was a wonderful man. She was so fortunate to have found him. He had called her "my dear." He had urged her to be good with all my heart." With such words he had given her a gift to carry through the week. He had given her, she felt, a big dose of love.
The Erica Hawkins Gallery occupied the sixth floor of a renovated loft building near Spring Street on lower Broadway. The building was not in the geographical center of the downtown gallery district, but close enough to justify its aura of self-importance-thick glass doors; austere all white lobby; uniformed security guard; pair of shiny steel freight elevators.
As Gelsey rode up in one that Tuesday morning, the names of the various establishments on the various floors were automatically lit in turn:
Icarus Arts; Sofie Winter Gallery; Jeremiah Bones Art Books; Tannhauser Gallery; 1. 1. Sing; and, at the top, Erica Hawkins.
The elevator door opened directly onto the gallery floor, where Erica and her young assistants, Dakota Hutchins and Justin Barrett, were busy arranging sculptures for an exhibition. A willowy young woman, nearly six feet tall, wearing dark glasses and dressed in tight black leather pants and a black T-shirt overlaid with a black leather vest, stood to one side watching. Gelsey recognized her as Jodie Graves, the artist whose work was being mounted.
"Gelsey!"
Erica came toward her, arms wide to embrace. She was a large, rotund, gray-haired woman with a booming voice and a maternal smile. Impossible, Gelsey thought, to discern Erica's character from her looks. The gallery owner, for all her fostering of young artists, was a steel-hard businesswoman and a militant, occasionally raging radical feminist.
Erica wrapped her arms around Gelsey and squeezed her to her bosom.
"The new painting-I adore it!" She whispered in Gelsey's ear: "If I don't flatter Jodie a little more she'll go into a snit. Wait in my office. Be with you in a flash."
Dakota and Justin waved and there was a curt nod of acknowledgment from Jodie, the kind of nod an athlete might give a rival before a race.
Gelsey glanced at Jodie's sculptures: commercial-store mannequins tortured into erotic positions, wrapped tightly in overlapping irregularly shaped pieces of black leather, the wrappings secured to the forms with chrome rivets.
"Nice," Gelsey said, smiling sweetly.
Jodie Graves turned away. Nice was the last word she wanted to hear; disturbing or even trashy would have been more happily received. But Gelsey would not give her that satisfaction. I've been there, she thought, taken the risks, 7 breathed the danger and the lust. The feelings Jodie goes for haven't been earned In Erica's office she found her latest Leering Man hanging opposite the desk. She stood back from it, tried to see it fresh rather than as a work she had struggled with day and night through the preceding week.
She had delivered it the previous morning, leaving it wrapped with Dakota at the door. She hadn't wanted to be there when Erica first looked at it. She didn't need to hear Erica pontificate again on the subject of female artists defined by male abusers.
Now, examining the portrait for the first time outside her studio, Gelsey tried to imagine its impact on a viewer. The Leering Man figure, as she thought of him, was there as always, but in this version he was richly embellished with shards of mirrored glass. And there were also painted-over objects glued around his face: the innards of eviscerated watches, coins, keys, bits of smashed wedding bands, overlapping pieces of torn currency, and now the remains of Dietz's money-belt object-all artifacts collected on her forays to the bars.
There was no chance that any of these objects would be recognized by a mark; if one happened to see the portrait, he would most likely find it strange. But perhaps he might also be attracted to the work by a mysterious magnetism he would not comprehend-the familiarity that exists between a person and his possessions even when those possessions have been broken, ripped, smashed and embedded in thick oil paint.
She was thinking about this when Erica breezed into the office, sighing the word artist and rolling her eyes to express the difficulty of dealing with such godlike beings image-makers, creators, the blessed and cursed. Then Erica gestured toward Leering Man.
"Now that," she said, "that's special. It's by far your best, Gelsey.
I mean it. Best!"
Gelsey felt a tremor. The Leering Man had been a recurring motif. He had appeared in numerous canvases over the years, usually in the background or hovering half-seen on the edge. But after she left Diana she began to isolate him as her principal subject. And within the past few weeks she had worked through a new approach, constructing and then deconstructing him out of the detritus of her expeditions. It was integral to the power of the portrait, she felt, that it be ornamented with these souvenirs and trophies. The Leering Man was composed of all men now, and would reflect all male viewers. He was singular yet generalized, specific yet abstract. He was also, she felt, beginning to enter the realm of art.
She explained to Erica that this new portrait was the first in a series by which she hoped to purge herself of her obsession with the leering face.
"I feel it strongly," Erica responded, eyes meeting Gelsey's. "You have the potential to become an important artist. We've done well with you these last couple of years, but I believe we're going to do far better now. Be bold. Keep doing- what you're doing. Take as long as you like.
Bring me a room full of paintings as good as that"-Erica gestured again at the portrait-"and I'll have the collectors begging on their knees."
She hugged Gelsey again. "We'll make them pay. Oh, how we'll make them pay!"
On her way out, Gelsey paused again to examine Jodie Graves's leather-wrapped mannequins. The sculptures, she thought, mirrored Jodie's sexual fantasies.
Then she was mad at herself. It was so much easier to see through the pretensions of others than to penetrate one's own. Just then Jodie sidled up.
"Erica showed me your painting." And? "I didn't like it much." Well, fuck You! "But then it grew on me." Ladi-da. "That's usually a good sign. Means it's powerful. I really felt it. I guess it hit me hard."
"Gee, Jodi-thanks."
"Maybe we could have brunch one day and talk?"
"Brunch? Sure. That would be great." Gelsey smiled and turned away.
As she rode down in the elevator she felt the fear again that she would run into someone who'd seen her around the Savoy with Dietz. She steeled herself Fear could only crush her. She knew she had to stay out of bars.
She was an artist, not a doper-girl; Erica Hawkins respected and admired her. She must hold on to that.
"Up-down! Up-down! Higher! Higher!" The cries of the red-haired, pony tailed aerobics instructor were relentless. "Impact!
Impact!" she bellowed.
Gelsey strained to obey. Images of thirty exercising women pranced across the mirrored wall. "Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who's the fairest one of all?" Gelsey thought she might scream if she allowed that phrase to streak one more time across her brain.
"Higher! Impact!
Mirrors! Would they never leave her alone? Why was she so drawn to them?
Most people, brought up around such an obsessive thing, would spend their lives running away from it. Why hadn't she fled? Why did she feel she must live above the maze, the trap her father had built that was now her prison?
"Impact! Higher!
The images danced. "Mirror, mirror on the wall..
Gelsey shut off the refrain. There were many snippets of mirror literature she could call to mind to blot out Snow White. Mirrors had been a literary subject since the first woman had examined her reflection in a pool of water. Her father liked to quote from Shakespeare and the older poets, but Gelsey preferred the moderns. Anne Sexton: "Take my looking-glass and my wounds/and undo them." Simone de Beauvoir: "Captured in the motionless, silvered trap." Sylvia Plath: "I am silver and exact, I have no preconceptions… I am not cruel, only truthful… most of the time, I meditate on the opposite wall."
Up-down! Impact!
Maybe Dr. Z was right. Maybe there was a secret down there in the maze, a secret she had been hovering above for years and still had not been able to see. Auden had urged: "O look, look in the mirror/O look in your distress." Dylan Thomas had raged: "Still a world of furies/Burns in many mirrors." Yeats had sung: "I rage at my own image in the glass."
And Borges had written of hearing "from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons."
Leering Man, Mirror Man, dream-sister… mirrors, maze, mirror maze… mirror madness. God, is there no end?