Amor and Psycho: Stories Read Online Free Page B

overlooked the estuary of the Glass River. The town itself was formerly working-class and almost defiantly second-rate. Its converted industrial properties drew the sort of young professional people who raised children and confronted primal dramas—or shucked their primal dramas and sent Dr. Drema their bruised adolescent fruits.
    The consulting room occupied the second story. Persian rugs covered the floors as well as a couch and a table. More rugs hung from the walls. A tang of history clung to the rugs: old dust, mothballs, something sour underneath the wool that Dr. Drema associated—pleasantly—with the dead. (She had bought the rugs all together at an estate sale when she moved.) Because of the rugs, the consulting room absorbed most of the sounds made there, and the air sparkled with dust. She quickly lost three patients who suffered from allergies. But because demand for her hours exceeded her supply, Dr. Drema could afford to let them go.
    She’d come to the small town in pursuit of a dancer called Peter Dvorjak, whom she had met when he performed in a festival in San Miguel de Allende: He begged her to becomeinvolved with him. She had been moved by his physicality, by his ability to communicate, through dance, complex psychological states. Peter Dvorjak was drawn, in turn, by Dr. Drema’s intensity, intuition, experience and apparent lack of interest in producing a child of her own.
    Peter had a child from a previous marriage, a boy called Mikhail, who preferred to be called Mike. Mike was another reason why Dr. Drema became interested in Peter—and why she kept a corn snake in a terrarium in her consulting room, on a table covered with a Persian rug. The snake represented Dr. Drema’s commitment to Mike. It also caused the first frisson between herself and Peter, who proved squeamish around thawed mice. Dr. Drema responded generously—generosity was easy—and said the snake could live at her place. She kept the tank in her consulting room, the heart of her house; she didn’t mind. Dr. Drema’s chief interest in life lay in the study of symbols—and what animal is more symbolic than a snake?
    She and Mike named the snake Herpatia. Sometimes, between appointments, Dr. Drema removed Herpatia from the tank and let the snake slither between her hands and around her shoulders. Herpatia’s skin felt like fine leather; she was also playful and strong, even
headstrong
, since this quality expressed itself most strongly in her head. One time, Herpatia slithered down the cleavage of Dr. Drema’s sweater and emerged above the metal button on her jeans. She made a light, dry sound, traveling, and produced an extraordinary sensation; Dr. Drema had never felt anything like it.
    Always, after she had handled the snake, Dr. Dremawashed her hands. Someone at the pet store had said, “You must always wash your hands after handling the snake,” plus one other indelible word:
ectoparasite
. Convincing!
    Herpatia, in her twenty-gallon tank, became a point of focus for Dr. Drema’s patients—a live animal, a mythic presence, but not active enough to distract from the analytic work. The snake also drew Mike naturally into this room of confidences in which anything could be said. Dr. Drema herself found the atmosphere—the live animal, the heavy silence, the glittering bands of dust from old rugs in the air—vicariously liberating. She liked all animals, but especially nonmammals. Before the corn snake—in San Miguel—she used to keep a little yellow bird, which sometimes sat upon her shoulder while she listened to her patients talk.
    Sometimes she sat in the consulting room with Mike and kept him company while he handled Herpatia. In Dr. Drema’s professional opinion, Mike, at ten, was a too-busy child, always studying Greek or Latin, or tennis, or openings in chess, or practicing Wholfheart on the violin. Peter Dvorjak took his responsibilities as a parent seriously. A serious person himself, he rose every morning