Appalled by the depth of Laura’s self-interest, her lack of concern for Magnusson, Jocundra opened her magazine and made no reply.
Suddenly animated, Laura pulled out a file from her pocket and began doing her nails. ‘Well,’ she said prissily, ‘I may not have totally succeeded with Hilmer, but I’ve done my job properly… not like that Audrey Beamon.’
Jocundra was irritated. Audrey, though dull, was at least no aggravation. ‘What’s your problem with Audrey?’ she asked coldly.
‘It’s not my problem.’ Registering Jocundra’s displeasure, Laura assumed a haughty pose, head high, gazing toward the house: a proud belle watching the plantation burn. ‘If you don’t want to hear it, that’s fine! But I just think you should know who you’re associatin’ with.’
‘I know Audrey quite well.’
‘Really!’ Laura hmmphed in disbelief. ‘Well, then I’m sure you know she’s been doin’ it with Jack Richmond.’
‘Doing it?’ Jocundra laughed. ‘Do you mean sex?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura primly. ‘Can you imagine?’
‘No. One of the orderlies is telling you stories to get you excited.’
‘It wasn’t any orderly!’ squawked Laura. ‘It was Edman!’
Jocundra looked up from her magazine, startled.
‘You can march right up there and ask him if you don’t believe me!’ Laura stood, hands on hips, frowning. ‘You remember when the cameras went out a whole day last week? Well, they didn’t go out… not for the whole day. Edman wanted to see what might happen if people didn’t know they were bein’ observed, and he got an eyeful of Audrey and Richmond!’
After Laura flounced off, Jocundra whimsically considered the prospect of green-eyed babies and thought about Laura’s capacity for lying - no doubt, vast; but she decided it was perfectly in keeping with Edman’s methods to have done what Laura said. She tried to imagine Audrey and Richmond making love. It was not as difficult to imagine as she had expected; in fact, given Audrey’s undergraduate reputation at Tulane - the sorority girl run amok - she probably would find Richmond fascinating. Further, Jocundra recognized that her own fascination with Donnell had allowed her to relax the role of therapist and become his friend; and if you could become the friend of a man such as Donnell, if you could put aside the facts of his life and see the person he really was -something which had been no chore to do because he was both fascinating and talented - well, then it might even be less of a chore to become his lover.
The dream, however, shone a new light on all this. Jocundra realized the boundaries of her friendship for Donnell were fraying, and she was glad of the realization. Now that it was out in the open she could deal with it, and dealing with it was important. There certainly was no future in letting it develop. The more she thought about the dream, the more convinced she was that Donnell had actually entered her room, that she had convinced herself she was asleep, observing him from the cover of sleep, from a dreamlike perspective. Self-deception was a particular talent of hers, and had already led her to a terrible marriage. Charlie had not wanted to be married, but she had persuaded him. He had been her first lover, and after the rite of passage was unsatisfactorily concluded, feeling sullied, ruined, the ghost of her Catholic girlhood rearing up like a dead queen out of a sarcophagus, she had seduced herself into believing she could love him. From a painfully ordinary and unattractive present she had manufactured the vision of a blissful future, and had coached herself to think of Charlie foremost, to please him, thinking these submissions would consolidate her vision, yet knowing all the while that he was not only her first lover, but also her first serious mistake. And now, it seemed, this same self-deception was operating along a contrary principle: disguising the growth of strong emotion as symptoms of friendship and responsibility.
To deal with it Jocundra let the routines of Shadows carry her away from Donnell. She attended staff meetings religiously and took every opportunity to join the other therapists for conversation and coffee; but when forced to be alone with Donnell she found these measures were not sufficient to counter the development of an attachment. She began to lie awake nights, brooding over his death, counting the days left him, wishing they would pass quickly, wishing they would pass slowly, experiencing guilt at her part in the proceedings. But despite her worries, she was satisfied that she could eventually cultivate a distance between herself and Donnell by maintaining an awareness of the problem, by adherence to the routines, and she continued to be thus satisfied until May the third arrived and all routines were shattered.
Four doctors were holding conference in the main hall, but Richmond’s raucous voice and discordant piano stylings flushed them from the sofa, set them to buttoning their lab coats and clipping their pens in a stiff-necked bustle toward the door. ‘Turkeys!’ snarled Richmond. He hammered out the chords, screaming the words after them, elbowing Donnell, urging him to join in the chorus.
The door slammed; Richmond quit pounding and noodled the keys, a musical texture more appropriate to the peaceful morning air. Sunlight laid a diagram of golden light and shadow over the carpet, the lowest ranks of the paintings were masked in reflected glare, and ceramic figurines glistened on end tables beside the French doors. Jocundra and Audrey were sitting on a sofa, talking, at ease, and their voices were a gentle, refined constant like the chatter of pet birds. The old house seemed to be full of its original atmosphere, its gilt and marble and lacquer breathing a graciousness which not even Richmond’s song could disrupt. And yet Donnell detected an ominous disturbance in the air, fading now, as if a gong had been struck and the rippling note had sunk below the audible threshold. He felt it dooming through his flesh, insisting that the peace and quiet was an illusion, that today was May the third, Magnusson’s May the third, and thereafter nothing would be the same. He was being foolish, he told himself, foolish and suggestible. He did not understand half of what Magnusson spouted, and the other half was unbelievable, but when he tried to finalize his disbelief, to forget about Magnusson, he could not. The old man’s arguments -though they sounded insane - were neither disassociative nor rambling, not senile.
‘Hey!’ Richmond nudged him and handed him a piece of paper. ‘Check it out.’
Donnell was glad for the distraction. He read the lines, then used the piano bench as a table on which to scrawl changes. ‘Try this.’ He passed the paper back to Richmond, who frowned and fingered the chords: