Chapter 42: Jane

Sunday, January 17, 1982

I called Dr. Stanton at her home number just before lunch. In my room, with the door closed, while Mom and Dad were in the den.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s Steve.”

“Steve! Thank you for calling. I ... well, obviously I’ve been thinking about you. A lot. I’d like to get together. At least right now, I admit this is for me, not for you. That’ll shift and change, but right now? Right now, it’s ... well, you know.”

“I know. I’ll talk with Angie. Maybe we can leave group early. Otherwise, it’d be next weekend.”

“Yes. Our next scheduled appointment isn’t until February 27^th, and then March 27^th. I’d be chewing my arm off long before that!”

I laughed. “We’ll manage to fit in a few extra appointments somehow. It wouldn’t be right to tell you something so important and then not meet.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it!”

“Where do you want to meet, if we can swing it?”

“Anywhere. I can meet you at a restaurant or something, or you can come to my house.”

“I’ll let you know. We can call from Mike’s.”

“Okay. Just let me know!”

I waited until we were in the car to study group to spring it on Angie. “Dr. Stanton wants to meet.”

She snickered. “Of course she does. And?”

“She says she can meet anywhere, including her house. I think maybe not that, but maybe. She mentioned a restaurant or something. I wouldn’t want to be overheard, though.”

“Yeah. Do you think she’d try to record us?”

“I ... I’m not sure. I doubt it? But if she mentions anything at all that would let her off the hook, we probably don’t want to answer that out loud.”

“Paranoia. Got it.”

“Let’s see how group looks. How bad is this week for you?”

“The usual exams. None should be terrible. Art’s easy, English is fine. Biology ... okay, I need to study. Algebra II is easy. World History feels like it’ll be okay.”

“That’s about where I am. I need some time with Chemistry. But that’s after Tuesday.”

“Leave about 3, 3:30?”

“I’m good with that.”

Angie swapped her nap around to Tuesday, apologizing to Gene. I called Dr. Stanton about 2:30. We still hadn’t resolved where to meet. After more consideration, I decided her house would be okay, and we’d just mention recordings flat-out. Paranoia, yes, but we could only take it so far. If she was going to do something like make recordings, the odds were she’d screw us one way or another.

I slipped off to the billiard room about 2:30 and called. “Dr. Stanton?”

“Hey, Steve.”

“We can meet today. After some thought, your house would be fine. So would your office or somewhere else.”

She hesitated. “I know you have a schedule to keep. My office is closer to your house. Let’s do that.”

“Okay. We’ll be there a bit after 3pm.”

“See you then. And thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I went back, found Ang, and let her know. We studied until 3pm, celebrating Cal’s birthday along the way. Then we wrapped up, let Rita know she could reach us at Dr. Stanton’s office, and headed for the car. I felt like the studying time I’d used was actually productive. I wasn’t obsessing as much about Dr. Stanton now. The cat was out of the bag; we’d know soon enough if curiosity was going to kill it. Yes, that’s a sad collision of two idioms, but, hey.

We were quiet on the drive. Holding hands, though. Jane was waiting in the lobby, of course, since they locked the building on Sunday. We rode up in the elevator and went right into her office. It was a bit odd having the building all dark and the receptionist’s desk empty.

“Again, thank you for coming over. And, um ... I wanted to make sure you’re still ... comfortable.”

Angie and I exchanged a look. “Nervous, but, as comfortable as we can be. We talked about it earlier. Neither of us think you would, but we felt that we should say that we do not want any recordings of this to exist.”

She laughed softly, nodded. “There are none and won’t be any, I promise.”

“Good.”

She shifted. “This is ... it’s an awkward situation.” Before I could respond, she continued. “It’s a decided risk of creating a multiple relationship, where we aren’t just therapist and patient. I’m definitely ... on your side. It’s not that. But there’s an obvious temptation that I could misuse information. I need to guard against that. It’s ... any teenage therapy has a sort of risk; I work for the parents but on behalf of the teenagers, and sometimes what’s right for a teenager is something the parent wouldn’t approve of.”

“Simple example: Cammie.”

She nodded. “If Cammie was one of my patients, I would need to ... obfuscate ... with her parents. Or decline to continue as her therapist. I don’t believe it would be ethical to place her safety and mental health at risk, which would happen if I revealed her sexuality.”

“Okay, that was a distraction. Go on.”

“Well, obviously I know that you know things that could ... well, make me rich, for instance. Getting you to talk about what stocks to buy would be a conflict of interest if it risked harming you, either by exposure or just by building the wrong relationship.”

“Yet we might tell you, because we like you.”

“Which makes us friends, which ... again, in a way a therapist has to be a friend. Just, a friend who has your long-term best interests in mind, not your short-term happiness.”

We both nodded.

“And I’m going to complicate it, perhaps. Given the ... situation ... I’m going to suggest you call me Jane. That’s not unusual — most of my institutional patients call me Dr. Jane, both because it helps build a relationship and, honestly, because occasionally a patient will attempt ... retaliation.”

I glanced at Angie again; she nodded. “We can do that. We’re both used to calling adults by their first names while maintaining respect.”

She laughed at that, harder than I expected. “It’s ... I’ve lived fewer years than you have and not that many more than Angie has, yet there’s nothing hollow in your saying ‘adults’ that way. My thoughts go back and forth. Part of me says it’s artifice, part of me says it’s natural.”

“It’s like I said last time. I’m fifteen-ish. I have memories of being much older, but I’m fifteen. A mature fifteen, but ... I relate to the world more like a fifteen-year-old for the most part. It hits me in odd ways. I think I’m more polite and respectful than I was before, but someone being older doesn’t impress me that much just by itself. Especially if they’re incompetent. I’ve always had a low threshold for that.”

“He has a lot of patience,” Angie laughed. “I would have strangled Ms. Demme this weekend.”

“I hate to derail, but ... oh?”

“Meg asked Ms. Demme, the Spring Woods debate coach, to ‘help’ at our tournament.” I did the finger quotes. “She’s ... difficult.”

“Useless,” Angie chimed in.

“Eh. She gets some kids to compete and a few of them aren’t bad. Anyway...”

“Anyway, Steve was in charge of CX pairings for third and fourth rounds, which involves a lot of sorting. Steve had a system that did it in fifteen minutes. Ms. Demme tried to jump in what, three times?”

“Two or three, I think.”

“Anyway, she tried to jump in repeatedly to start over and do it her way, which would’ve taken at least an hour.”

“I stayed polite, though.”

“He had Lizzie running interference, plus authority from Meg. We got Ms. Demme sidetracked long enough.”

“So, anyway, I still call her Ms. Demme and was respectful, but that’s more...”

Jane smiled. “Respecting the office, not the person.”

“Yes.”

“I can go with you meaning ‘adults’ the right way.”

“Repeating myself, I’m pretty sure fifty-five-year-old me, even in a fourteen-year-old body, wouldn’t have known what to do with Candice. I would’ve either bent over backwards to not be creepy or embraced some inner pedophile.”

“Ephebophile. Pedophile is pre-pubescent.” She laughed. “Most people don’t know the definition. I have to. Plus, there’s that decade of education.”

“Ephebophile, then. But I can’t say that I ever — at any point, at all — thought of Candice as being notably younger than me. Nor Angie, for all that we say ‘little sister’ and ‘big brother’. Technically, we’re ... fourteen years, or so, apart. But we’re obviously not.”

She laughed. “You two are the definition of getting sidetracked. Back to what I was saying. Call me Jane. Before we derail again, I had a few thoughts that I have to get out today.”

“Go ahead. Please.”

“First, I spent a lot of time thinking about the two of you. I mean, as a potential couple. I get it, now, much more. Why you’re so comfortable with your obvious attraction. I mean, I thought of it as, well, you have no biological relationship, which might make it more acceptable, and that’s true, but ... you have this ... supernatural ... connection. The universe literally put you together in a relationship where you’re ‘expected’ not to act on attraction, but for a reason that’s ... weak ... under the circumstances. You can’t take advantage of each other; you’re mature adults. In a way, anyway.”

We both nodded, exchanging glances. Angie spoke up. “I don’t think I’d gotten to exactly that point, but it makes sense. We’re both committed to keeping ‘behaving’ for now. Mom and Dad are very important to us and it would hurt them.”

I added. “And we ... think ... well. We think there’ll come a point where we know it’s the right time. Or there won’t. If it doesn’t come, we’re fine. If it does ... we’re also fine.”

She nodded. “And I approve of waiting, but it’s a very different approval than before. I would be hard-pressed to give a reason beyond the damage it would do to your parents. I would feel odd clinging to a law that I question the applicability of in your unique case. In a way, I feel guilty about pushing you to behave.”

Angie shook her head. “Honestly, it hasn’t been ‘right’, for us. You did the right thing. We have the emotions, but something is still ... it’s...”

“It’s just not... magic. Not what it should be,” I added.

“Let’s jump off right there. You meant magic a different way, but I’ve been thinking about the questions of ‘how.’ And ‘why.’ And ‘why you.’ I know you’ve been thinking about that, too, of course, and I don’t have any major breakthroughs.”

“Any good guesses?” I smiled hopefully.

“Not really.” Jane bit her lip. “If there’s a common thread, it’s wasted potential. Steve’s first life sounds more ‘successful’, but it’s pretty obvious it wasn’t what you wanted. And Angie’s...”

“Sucked,” Angie laughed, softly.

“I was going to be more diplomatic. And in your first lives the other also failed.”

“We think that maybe we both need the better versions of each other. That we learned some things that make us both better, and now we keep each other better.”

I nodded. “That seems to be how it works so far. I did fairly well, but not with relationships in particular, without Angie. And, she did lousy without me. Although part of that was luck; Angie’s first time around points out that without a little luck I would have been even worse off, and also unable to help her. This time, we got together at the right time to avoid the bad outcomes. Or...”