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  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.

  ‘I was born in Rented Rooms Five Dollars
  Down on Adjacent Boulevard,  You know that funky place got no fire escape,
  No vacancies, and a dirt front yard.  My mama was Nobody’s fool,  He left her for a masseuse down in New Orleans,
  Take the cash and flush the credit cards  Was the best advice he ever gave to me…’

  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.

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