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“But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno.
What is this fascination with criminals?
Rescue fantasy. They think they can fix them.
If ever she had felt an irresistible urge to punch someone in the face, it was now. The feeling came abruptly into being, frightening in its quick awakening from slumber. Six years of therapy and he transferred his need for violence onto her in some sickening twist of fate? Control fate, control the outcome. Grasping at it like a fish out of water.
She wanted to throttle Elliot.
“She’s blowing us off.”
“Leadbelly.”
“The answer is a female opera singer and gangster. Da da da da.”
And then his name was out in the open.
Tony Soprano.
An excited hush fell on the room and on her mind, settled like a heavy blanket on her senses, trying to compress her into the ground.
“Must be fascinating work?” someone tried to claim, to lead the conversation away from the obvious tension. She glared at Elliot.
Hypocrite. Cocksucker. Fucking snitch.
The last expletive was not her own voice in her head, not really. Anthony Soprano would have called Elliot a snitch and smashed his face into the table, quick like lightening. And repeatedly. It would rebound in the room with a sickening sound. There would be blood.
Unethical or not, Elliot did have a point. He was just going about it in a clumsily and desperately way. Everything was so graphic in her mind nowadays. She wanted to see blood. She wanted to scream. The object of her anger – her shortcomings – was not her colleagues. The object was the one person she could never let it out on. Instead, it bottled up inside her.
“It is,” she agreed, her voice grating. An edge she couldn’t work out, a scratch of annoyance. She felt everyone’s eyes on her with their morbid curiosity. Elliot’s smug look made her decision.
“You know,” she started, her tone having changed to a lower lilt, storytelling time. She stretched the words, paused theatrically, aware she had everyone’s full attention, “The last time it became known I was treating him, his associates tried to have me killed.” She waited a second longer, watched Elliot furrow his brow. She smiled at him, aware she was only showing her teeth. She wanted to say fuck you. Instead she went with, “I had to go into hiding.”
Silence hung heavy. She would persevere through this mess. She swirled the wine in her glass, her eyes on the deep color. Like blood. She emptied the contents and savored the heavy taste. With a poignant look at Elliot, she finished her tale, “I think you should refrain from discussing anything related to him. Just a friendly warning.”
The mood changed.
She looked at Elliot, savoring his unease. It was rich like the Valpolicella.
She left the table in stunned silence, her empty glass in hand and she walked into the kitchen to refill it, but mostly to get away from the tension and the superiority of everyone. There was something inside her chest cavity wanting to crawl out with claws, and she was afraid of what she might say if she let it. Sometimes, she felt his presence, against her right shoulder as if he stood behind her back, watching and observing, his gruff voice throwing obscenities at the world around her.
Her very own guardian sociopath.
Elliot followed her. Naturally.
Conversation picked up again in the living room. Lively chatter. She tried not to listen – she didn’t want to know what they were talking about. She wasn’t invested.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Elliot punctually said as he came within her space again, big owlish eyes behind his ridiculous glasses. “You should have terminated the therapy ages ago. You’re acting very unlike yourself. Threatening your colleagues, really Jennifer?”
Again with this shit.
“HIPAA! Confidentiality! Are they constructs you find beneath you?” she asked him, her anger on full blaze. “I could have your license.”
“What do criminals do when backed into a corner, Jennifer?” Elliot asked her, ignoring her outrage, her threat. “When everything crumbles in their hands? When their lives spin out of control – where do you think they will exert that need to control everything?”
“He’s not gonna hurt me – I’ve told you hundreds of times,” she sighed, feeling less angry. Elliot looked at her, arching an eyebrow. He was just looking out for her in his own belittling way. Was this what happened when everyone in a social circle were psychiatrists? This incessant navel-gazing and picking until her soul felt raw?
She needed new friends.
“Frankly I’m uncertain where you are getting that fact from? Intuition? Gut feeling?”
She wanted to push his glasses off. Throw them to the ground and stomp on them.
“If he wanted to hurt me, he would already have done so. He’s had plenty of opportunities.”
“The man knows only violence,” Elliot then said, “If pressed he will act accordingly on instinct. And that instinct will always be violence.”
“You think I don’t know?”
She was perturbed, breathing hard, her hands shaking.
“If you’ve watched the news, you would understand where I’m coming from. Internal mafia struggles, that’s what it’s all about. Family against family. They say it will be like the last time,” Elliot said quietly and gentle, “out in the streets. It will result in intense paranoia, you know this. Paranoia and no impulse control. That’s not a good combination.”
She knew.
Everything was screaming inside her that her patient was decompensating at a rapid rate. Ever since his shooting despite however glib he was at projecting he was a changed man because of that. She could see through his lies now. He was gambling, drinking and exerting violence like it was his daily need for five cups of espresso. He was deflecting in therapy whenever she tried to get back on track. Instead he ranted. And in his rants, he was almost too honest – but not in a good way. Not conducive to change, reflection or acknowledgment. Or maybe, the fault was with her? Maybe she wasn’t the right therapist for him.
How many years had she tried to get him to confront his feelings about his mother and his uncle? How many more would it take for him to confront his father and the way that man had been as bad as the two others? Would any of it even matter for a man like Anthony Soprano?
“Guys,” Edward butted in, coming in from the living room, “I really think you two should relax a little. Have some more wine. And maybe leave the Mafia to themselves.”
She rolled her eyes but let her wine glass be refilled. She ignored Elliot’s look of concern.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream.
Inconveniently – coincidentally my ass, she thought – Richard had left her a long-winded message on her answering machine. The fucking study again. Yochelson et Samenow. She had read the study and she didn’t need to read it again. It wasn’t a systematic review or a meta analysis. It wasn’t new. She had known all along – she’d read it before she took him on. She wasn’t even sure Anthony Soprano was a true sociopath. She was certain however, that she couldn’t let others diagnose him based on their ill-perceived view of him from news outlets and studies that screamed “you can’t rehabilitate criminals.”
She rang Elliot up, waited impatiently but he didn’t answer. She left him an angry message, told him to leave her ex-husband out of this debacle. She would do things in her own time. Richard’s message she ignored as she had every other message he left her once in a blue moon. If he was concerned, he would show up on her doorstep and she would take him seriously. But this passive-aggressive thing, leaving her messages and breadcrumbs and studies, was simply a nuisance easily cumbered.
That night she had a dream.
A nightmare, perhaps. She was unsure about its classification even when she woke up bathed in sweat and breathing hard. Nightmare, Elliot would say. Dream, Anthony would say. She settled on dream. Her nightmares were usually more graphic, more violent.
In the dream her office had been shrouded in darkness, the only light the lamp on her desk. Anthony Soprano was sitting on her couch in an expensive suit reminiscent of that time he had wanted to date her. Grey suit, black shirt, tie, breast pocket with a red flower. He had been relaxed and he had been intent on watching her with a charming smile. One of those that reached his eyes, made him appear younger and attractive. Dressed up for her sake in a way that made him feel vulnerable. But that was appearance only; in the dream she was the vulnerable one, restrained with both arms taped to the armrest of her chair. Duct tape. Out of some horror movie. Her skirt had been unprofessionally short, her thighs and legs bare, her skin hot.
“I killed them all,” he confessed in the dark to her, his eyes shining as he gave her another charming smile. She liked his smiles. And then he had started reminiscing about one murder after another, and she had been trapped by the physical restraints but also by a morbid fascination, every word out of his mouth etched into her skin like invisible tattoos. His words leaving permanent scars on her body, on her mind. When he was done, he rose as if in slow motion and approached her. Just as he leaned in and was about to kiss her, his lips inches from hers, she woke.
Awaking alone in her bedroom, she wished it was daylight or that she had somebody next to her, some way for her not to feel like she was drowning in solitude and darkness. Her thoughts lingered on a conversation from a therapy session a while back. About his nephew. About the car accident. It was pushed to the surface now and she knew even then she had gathered the meaning behind his words, the subtlety of violence between the lines, but she had not wanted to linger on them. Lights blinking and flashing, a siren in her head now, as the dream – nightmare – prodded her into analyzing everything.
Fear was heavy in her mind.
He’d loved and hated his nephew.
She closed the door so she didn’t have to watch his retreating back, so she wouldn’t feel pressured to call him back and explain herself in a less hostile fashion. Ambiguous, she thought, was an apt description. Caught up in ambiguous feelings whenever he was in her office – whenever she thought of him.
Once the door closed, she locked it.
She breathed out, exhaled relief as it flooded her.
Done.
Horribly and unprofessionally done but terminated nonetheless.
It had gone better than she had imagined because in her imaginings, and there had been so many scenarios in her head, it had always ended with some violent eruption. And those that didn’t end in violence, never ended, because she would loose her nerve and keep him on.
And now, it had happened without any breach of her personal space. He had been angry, she had been angry. He was in crisis. She felt she was in crisis as well. Any outsider would say their therapy was at a dead-end and any insider would say it had been unraveling for some time now. Some would say she was abandoning him and that thought made her nauseous.
Wasn’t it a success that termination had been without her crumbling to the ground in fear? Without him harming her in a misplaced show of loss of control?
She had expected it, almost welcomed it, but it hadn’t come to pass.
There were clear boundaries in her office and she enforced them; most of her patients never breached them. Anthony did, time and time again, and she felt how her limits always seemed to be pushed further and further away from what she usually allowed. Expansion and rearrangement, she’d done a lot of it, compartmentalizing and bargaining, to keep him in therapy.
He was assertive and decisive in his thinking. From thought to action, there was no space, no second-guessing, no gray nuances. It happened in the blink of an eye. The times he had crossed the barrier from his side of the room to hers, had been dizzying. The way he threw his broad frame into action with furious swiftness.
Overwhelming.
She always felt rooted to the spot, transfixed with terror, never knowing what the outcome would be. An in between those violations, he’d also crossed the room to comfort her in a show of empathy that had been surprising. A conundrum. No one had ever made her feel so bathed in fear that it felt almost compelling. No one had ever kissed her so brazenly, so self-assured and forceful, that she felt her soul was being ripped in two.
Fucking hell.
Rescue fantasy, Elliot’s voice mocked her.
If only it had been so easy to pin down and define her relationship to Anthony Soprano, then she would have known how to stop it, change it or regress it. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel conflicted by remorse now, afflicted by an unbearable pain.
He was no longer her patient.
Her legs trembled and she sat in her office chair heavy with gravity. Everything blurred. Tears formed and traveled of their own intuition.
Crying.
For him or for herself?
She let the light from her hall illuminate her entry into the kitchen, putting away her groceries. She kicked off her heels, her jacket and unbuttoned her blouse at the top. She considered whether she wanted a glass of wine before bed. It was hot and stuffy outside as well as inside her apartment.
When she came into the living room, unbuttoning another button and yawning, light from the streetlights illuminated the big shadow on her couch. Any normal person would surely have screamed. Instead she stood still, her breath caught somewhere in her throat, her fingers stilled on her blouse.
There on her couch was Anthony Soprano. Covered in darkness, his countenance hard to fathom and a heavy assault rifle cradled in his arms. Like some horror stepped right out of a nightmare.
Where was her flight response when she really needed it?
“Anthony,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. There was a small breathless quality to it but it was hardly noticeable. “Breaking and entering now?”
“Almost too easy,” he replied, his tone dark and quiet, “your front door might as well have been open.” His voice was stilted and he looked emotionless – detached from everything. His eyes looked glazed over when he looked at her, took in her half unbuttoned blouse, the skin of her chest exposed.
Another flashing red light.
Deescalation, her mind screamed at her. She needed to deescalate everything. Another analytical part of her thought about connection. She needed to force ahead their connection. Bring out sympathy. She took a step closer to him, her feet having a mind of their own.
“You’re scaring me,” she told him, honesty putting a tremble in the tone. Her eyes strayed to the assault rifle, but he seemed to not notice it.
In her darkest hours she had always imagined that if he was going to expose of her, he would do it in a more personal manner. Up close with his hands around her neck. She’d had nightmares about at a time – years back. Maybe he thought point blank execution was more humane? But then he would have brought a single hand gun, right? Assault rifle, what the fuck was that? Her fear was out in abundance, riding high on adrenaline.
“Sorry,” he said and that single contrite word transformed everything. Metamorphosis. He didn’t look detached and cold. He looked remarkably sad, a little boy sitting in the dark, all lost and alone, waiting for someone to care.
And fuck. She did care. That was the bane of her existence, wasn’t it? Why she hadn’t terminated their therapy the first time she had been scared of him.
“It’s okay,” she said almost on reflex. This was just like a therapy session, she reminded herself.
Silence seemed heavy between them.
“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky,” he recited, his voice breaking through the silence like a knife. “That was you, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, “I didn’t think it wise to visit you in person at the time.”
“Smart,” he grumbled.
“Can I sit down?” she asked him and pointed to the couch, next to him.
His affirmation was a stilted nod.
She sat down next to him, close enough that she could watch his expression more clearly even in the dark.
“I had no where else to go,” he said, guiltily. His hands tensed around the weapon.
“It’s okay,” she reassured him, “I can see you are in distress, Anthony.”
“It’s the end,” he said, looking through her, “I might as well blow my brains out here. Wouldn’t that be poetic? Paint your walls red. I’ve got a wad of money in my breast pocket. You can use that for the cleaners.”
Another alarm bell.
She watched the assault rifle. He was holding unto it tightly.
“Anthony,” she said, her fingers coming to rest on his hands, softly as she caressed the back of his hand, the muscles clenched tight. “You don’t need this right now, okay?”
He grunted and stared at her.
She pried his fingers loose and he let go easily. She placed the rifle on the coffee table, the barrel away from them. It was cold. It was the first time she had touched a weapon like that. It was heavy and big. She could understand the security there was inherent in holding it, in knowing it was there to defend your life but it was more poignant than a simple gun. It screamed violence in her mind by just looking at it.
He was rigid and tense. He probably felt unsafe and empty. Scared and sad, she surmised. It took a split second of inner debate, but really, there was little she could tell him that she hadn’t already told him before.
“Come,” she said and opened her arms to him, inviting him with a soft smile. She enfolded him in her embrace and he went willingly. He was heavy against her, his head on her shoulder, his lips against her neck. His arms came around her middle with a fierce grip. “It’s okay,” she soothed as she held him.
“You smell nice,” he mumbled into her neck, his breath hot against her skin.
She wondered if he had been drinking. But instead of tensing up, she ignored his comment. She settled into the embrace, circling caresses on his back, up and down. She felt how he relaxed further into her, uncurled all tension and let out a trembling breath.
She wished she had poured that glass of wine. She felt too sober to deal with this.
“Everyone’s dying around me,” he mumbled, “and New York wants me dead.”
She inhaled.
How could she take his pain away? Lessen it?
“Have you tried compromise?” she asked, feeling stupid. “Taking a step back. Concessions.”
“If I back down, the vultures come out,” he said, his voice clear, “I’m dead either way.”
She sighed. Conflict resolution was not going to be the answer as if she thought he would ever back down from something like that. That would be admitting weakness, wouldn’t it?
“You’ve always said, you’ve known how this ended,” she said, reminded of his almost flippant comment back then.
“Yeah,” he breathed out, his hold around her tightening.
Silence again. Nestling into her, his large frame heavy against her.
“I wanted to see you one last time,” he said, his honesty pulling at her, his arms tightening around her, his lips stilled against her neck, tickling, just above her pulse point.
“Okay,” she replied, still stroking his back.
They sat silent, his breaths heavier than hers, darkness like a cocoon against reality.
“I’m sorry about our last session,” she told him after a while.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled to herself but didn’t volunteer more. He wouldn’t understand the complexities of it, her reason for ending it, her reason for doing it so harshly. She did not feel it was the right time to explain it to him.
She wondered how long it would take, this embrace, this enfolding his body into hers and offering simple comfort. His scent was peculiar – familiar and strong. It washed over her with solemnity. Sedated her senses. She felt sleepy.
“Tell me something,” he said, breaking the silence. His fingers were playing with the end of her blouse, the material being twirled in between his thumb and index finger. They ghosted across her bare skin beneath, her spine, not touching but just there, an inch away from touching.
“Tell you what?”
“Anything. Doesn’t matter.”
She thought for a while, wondering. Then her eyes fell on the stack of books on the corner table next to her reading glasses. He wouldn’t enjoy the large volume on evidence-based treatment for trauma-related psychological disorders. Nor the Clinical Handbook of Psychiatry and the Law. The third one was too cheesy, a romance she wasn’t even invested in herself. That left one; a small worn book. It had followed her from her time at med-school and through her divorce to now.
“Have you read Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy?”
He shook his head.
“It’s a classic. I think you would like it. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. It’s in Italian.”
“Italian?” His voice peaked up.
“Yes,” she smiled and eased back from the embrace, watching his eyes. Alert and intense. Focused on her. Fixated and obsessive, Elliot would say.
She eased back into the couch, the book in her hand. He looked lost, sitting up rigid. She patted her leg and when he still looked at her with such pain, she pulled him into her lap by gently prodding his shoulder until he was supine. Had his mother ever read him goodnight stories? Held him through his sadness? She softly stroked his temple and then started reading.
As she read, she watched him close his eyes. He wouldn’t understand it but maybe the words would soothe his soul for a little while.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!”
She fully relaxed when she heard his breaths even out and she knew he had fallen asleep. She sat for a while in the dark, enjoying the weight of him in her lap, enjoying caressing his temple, smoothing his hair back.
When he started snoring, she put the book back on the table. She contemplated the darkness. The peculiarity of sitting in the dark with him asleep on her lap. Her anger had subsided, carried away on a great wind, she thought.
Irony of the universe.
She fell asleep herself. Elliot would have a thing or two to say about that; her complete trust in a sociopath with an assault rifle. She smiled. Nuances, she thought, they had always escaped Elliot.
And Richard for that matter.
She woke when he startled awake. It was the middle of the night and she had fallen asleep with him heavy on her lap and her neck at an odd angle as she had reclined back against the couch cushions. He sat up abruptly, looked around his surroundings, frantic and wild at first.
“Anthony,” she said, and he looked at her, his eyes zeroing in on her with something she couldn’t discern. “Relax,” she said, “It’s okay. You fell asleep.”
He visibly relaxed and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“This is not how I imagined you and me sleeping together,” he said. His mouth moved into a wolfish grin and he was so characteristically himself that she couldn’t process it.
She replied with her own shaky smile. She couldn’t bring herself to agree instead she arched her spine, put a hand around her neck, rolling it. It was aching from the position.
He was watching her with his full attention. She watched him back. Her skin itched and prickled. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth.
There was so many things she wanted to say, to tell him. She wanted him to come back to therapy – she wanted to plead and implore him to seek therapy, but mostly she wanted him in her own office – and at the same time, she never wanted to see him again. What he wanted to say, that was both a myth and yet so clear to her. So many things left unsaid between them throughout the years. All the conversations they had never had – because she had been afraid, because he had been angry. Because circumstance, nature, fate, whatever had intervened.
Murder.
Sex.
Violence.
Love.
And as abruptly as the times before, in an eruption of sudden action, he was in her face and kissing her, his hands once again holding her face. She debated it for seconds – long, prolonged seconds – and then she kissed him back, her hand coming to rest against his chest before she snaked it around his neck and forgone all pretense. He tasted of vodka, tobacco and something sweet.
She moaned when one of his hands landed on her hip and ran up along the side of her stomach and cupped her breast through her blouse. He was being gentle, his broad hand stilling there, around her breast. She didn’t mind.
He continued kissing her, his mouth hot on hers. She kissed him back, her lips tingling, her stomach falling away into nothing. Pent up emotions pushed everything into something catalytic. She felt devoured; desired; devastated.
It stopped as abruptly as it started.
She leaned back, created some space between them. He scooted back, his hands by his own side again. She watched him carefully. She didn’t want to say the word, neither did he apparently. They sat silently observing each other. Devouring one last look, maybe. Imprinting it. The kiss had been enough of a goodbye, hadn’t it? She would never have kissed him back otherwise if it hadn’t been goodbye.
She sat long on the couch in her living room after he left, hypnotized with sorrow. An old pain that was once again aching up, inside her thorax, where her heart beat. He’d been like a comet in her life; a roaring brightness of fire – a sign of some ominous divinity she couldn’t fathom let alone fix or some harbinger of pain and sorrow.
Finite