Physical

Good news!"

Temple's doctor was smiling, glancing through a sheath of X rays as he entered the waiting room where Temple sat shivering. Temple thought, Not lymphatic cancer, then.

What he was suffering from was—severe muscle spasm in his upper neck? Overstretched ligaments? Possible disc injury? Temple listened with a dutiful show of interest. It was mildly surreal that Dr. Freddie Dunbar, whom he knew from the Saddle Hills Tennis Club, should be delivering the news—Dr. Dunbar, whose tennis game was dogged, mediocre. Temple's heartbeat had quickened when Dunbar entered the room bearing what Temple had assumed was his death warrant ("Hmm. The lymphoid glands appear to be swollen. That's not good," Dunbar had murmured during the physical examination preceding the X rays), but now it was good news, not bad. His heart was returning to normal, or what passed for normal. Temple would live after all—it was only a physical problem.

Temple had become one of those men who in middle age plunge into physical activities—in Temple's case, jogging, cycling, tennis, downhill skiing—with the avidity of youth, when a man believes he's not only immortal but that his body is also protected by a sacred aura. Not me! Not me! I can't be stopped, not me! Now that Temple was 45—no, 46, his birthday, unheralded, had been the previous Saturday—he hadn't any less energy or enthusiasm, nor any less skill—he would swear to this!—but things seemed to be happening to him. A skiing accident in Vail, ankle in a cast for weeks last winter; a fall on the tennis court, bruises and lacerations on his right forearm. And a (minor but annoying) heart problem. (Which he hadn't indicated on the medical form he'd filled out at the front desk. Dunbar was a neck man, (continued on page 106)Physical(continued from page 100) not a cardiologist.) And this latest problem, he guessed, must be from tennis, too, recurrent pain in the upper right side of his neck.

Why was pain in the neck, like pain in the ass, some sort of dumb joke? Temple had had his for 11 weeks now, and it was no joke.

Dunbar held the X rays to the light for Temple to examine if he wished, discussing Temple's physical problem in a thoughtful, measured voice. It was a voice Temple knew, for he employed it frequently himself: one professional to another. One man to another. Above all it was the kindly yet magisterial voice doctors employ in such settings—these breathtaking new quarters of the Saddle Hills Neck & Back Institute—to forestall patients' panic that they would have a hand in paying for such luxury. Temple, a moderately successful Saddle Hills developer, knew the price of such high-quality custom-designed construction: enormous landscaped lot, octagonal two-floor building with an atrium foyer, lots of solarium features, Spanish-looking tiles. The waiting room, to accommodate the patients of the institute's eight physician-partners, was as spacious and plush as the lobby of a luxury hotel. Temple noted with interest that the therapists appeared to be exclusively female. And young. White-clad in slacks and cottonknit tunic tops with names stitched in pink above their left breasts. One curly-haired young woman walking briskly past with an armload of towels glanced in Temple's direction with a quick smile—did she know him? Another, tenderly overseeing a damaged-looking man of Temple's age who was trying, face contorted with pain, to do a single push-up, had china-doll features and hair the color of apricot sherbet. But it was a petite, dark-haired girl who caught Temple's eye as, her own posture ramrod straight, she massaged the neck of a woman lying limp on her stomach on a table. She was a pretty girl, not beautiful, with filmy-dark Mediterranean hair and olive-pale, slightly blemished skin. Temple's heart went out to her. You just didn't see girls with pimply complexions anymore in America. Where had they all gone?

"It isn't common," Dunbar was saying. "You say you've been flying a lot recently? Here's what I'm guessing: You picked up a viral infection from stale air circulating and recirculating in the plane. It settled in a neck muscle already strained from exertion and poor posture. Once the muscle goes into spasm, as yours has, it can take quite a while to heal."

"Poor posture?" Temple said, hurt. He immediately straightened his shoulders, elevated his head. "How can you assume that, Freddie?"

"Assume it? I can see it."

Dunbar was a short, peppy-wiry man who may have been a few years younger than Temple. He had ghostgray eyes, a congenial but guarded smile; Temple would have to reassess him, in light of this multimillion-dollar medical investment. The doctor sat on the edge of the examining table to demonstrate. "This is proper posture, see? At the back of the neck, a small inward curve, the cervical lordosis it's called," Dunbar said, touching the nape of his neck, head uplifted and chin slightly retracted. "And here, at the lower back, a similar hollow. When you slouch as you've been doing, everything sags, your head protrudes and a considerable strain is placed on your neck muscles. And if these muscles have been infected or injured in any way, the injury can be exacerbated, and quite painful. Your muscle has gone into spasm. The X ray shows a kind of knot."

Temple's awkwardly corrected posture made his neck ache more. He kneaded the sore muscle at the back of his head. "A knot," he said, bemused. "How do you untie it?"

Dunbar said, not ungraciously, "That's what we're here for."

The consultation was over. It had not seemed hurried, yet only eight minutes had passed. Temple had spent most of the hour shivering in the X-ray unit. Dunbar quickly wrote out a prescription for a muscle relaxant—"Be sure not to drink while taking these, Larry, and be careful driving," as if Temple had to be cautioned about such an elementary measure—and a prescription for Temple to take to the physical therapy clinic downstairs. Somehow, Temple was in for three therapy sessions weekly until his pain subsided.

The men shook hands, as after a tennis match. Dunbar, the weaker player, had unaccountably won. It was only then that Dunbar asked, his expression subtly shifting, an actual light coming up in his eyes, "And, Larry, how is Isabel?"

"Who?"

"Isn't that your wife's—your former wife's—name? Isabel?"

"Oh, you mean Isabelle." Temple gave the name the French intonation Isabelle preferred. Coolly he said, "I'm afraid I don't know, Freddie. Isabelle moved to Santa Monica after the divorce and remarried." Temple was breathless, angry. He was still smarting over that crack about poor posture, and he couldn't have said whether he resented Dunbar asking about Isabelle or only that he had asked belatedly, about to walk away. And Temple knew, even before he presented his Visa card at the front desk, that he'd be criminally overcharged: $338 for the visit!

The glamorous young woman who processed his bill smiled at him anxiously. "Mr. Temple, are you all right?"

"Thanks, I'm fine. I'm in agony," Temple said, smiling in his affable, charming way. "I'm in spasm, actually. It sounds sexual but it isn't. I always walk with my head under my arm."

Thinking on his way downstairs that he'd simply walk out, get into his car and drive away—what the hell. Quit while he was out only $338. Physical problems embarrassed him. He was sweating, wincing with pain in his neck and head. It wasn't that smug hustler Dunbar he was furious with; it was his former wife Isabelle. Damn you: What a way to treat a man who loved you. Crazy for you, and what did I get out of it? Kick in the teeth, in the neck. In the balls.

•

Despite the codeine in the muscle relaxant, washed down with beer, Temple had a wretched night. Alone with his physical self.

Defeatedly, the next morning he checked into the physical therapy clinic of the Saddle Hills Neck & Back Institute and after a restless wait of 40 minutes was assigned a therapist. "Hello, Mr. Temple? I'm Gina. Will you come this way?" Dazed with pain, Temple squinted at whomever it was with the somber equanimity of a condemned man greeting his executioner. He saw the petite young woman with the dark hair, olive skin and very dark, thickly lashed eyes. Gina in pink script above her left breast. His heartbeat quickened. Oh, ridiculous!

The young woman led Temple more briskly than he could comfortably follow, a steel rod of pain driven through his neck. Through the large, airy, L-shaped space, past ingenious torture machines of pulleys, rings, bars, pedals, into which shaky men and women were being helped, victims of what physical mishaps, what unspeakable muscular or neurological deterioration one could only imagine. Temple did not want to stare. He feared seeing someone he knew, and being seen and known in turn. A well-built young man stood poised atop a curious disk, gripping a bar and trying desperately to balance himself; terror shone in his eyes as his legs failed, he began to fall and two attendants deftly caught him beneath the arms. Another man, Temple's age, with thick, bushy, receding hair very much like Temple's, lay stretched out groaning on a mat, having collapsed in the midst of an exercise. Back trouble, Temple guessed. Quickly, he looked away.

"In here, Mr. Temple. Would you like me to help you lie down, or can you manage yourself?" Gina shut the door: Thank God, they were in a private room. Unassisted, Temple climbed up on and stretched out on an eight-foot-long padded table, a warm rolled towel exactly fitted to the aching hollow of his neck. He shut his eyes, terribly embarrassed. Flat like this, on his back, he felt—unmanned. An overturned beetle. What was this girl seeing? What was she thinking? Luckily the crises of the past several months had burned off most of Temple's excess weight at the waist and gut: 180 pounds packed into a five-foot-ten frame, upper-body muscles still fairly solid, Temple didn't look—did he?—like a loser. He was wearing a fresh-laundered T-shirt, chino trousers, jogging shoes. He'd showered and hastily shaved within the hour and his jaws stung pleasantly. He knew that, upright, he was a reasonably attractive man; looked years younger than his age on good days. But this was not a good day. He hadn't slept more than two or three hours the previous night. His eyes were ringed with fatigue and finely threaded with blood. It touched him to the quick that a young woman, a stranger, should see him in so weakened and debased a state.

"Mr. Temple, please try to relax."

Gina's voice was intense, throaty. Kindly. Temple did not open his eyes as she began to "stretch" his neck, as she explained—standing behind him, gripping the base of his skull and pulling gently at first, then with more strength. A woman's touch like ivory against his burning skin. Christ! He thought of masseuses, prostitutes. But this was therapy prescribed by Freddie Dunbar the neck specialist. This was legitimate, the real thing. Temple tensed, expecting excruciating pain, and could not quite believe that none came. He forced himself to breathe deeply, and by degrees he began to relax. "Now retract your head, please. No, like this. Farther. Hold for a count of three. Release, relax and repeat, ten times." Unquestioning, Temple followed instructions. Gina then began to knead the knotted muscles at the base of his skull, slowly on both sides of his neck, down to his shoulders and back up again. At the injured muscle, the fingers probed pure white-hot pain and Temple cried out like a stricken animal. "Sorry, Mr. Temple," Gina murmured, fingers easing away quickly as if repentant.

An exhausting drill of exercises. Sets of ten. Again, again. Retracting the head, side-bending the neck. On his stomach, sitting up, on his back again. When he gasped aloud, Gina said gently, as if reproving, "Initial pain increase is common. Just go slowly." Temple realized he was floating on an island of pain like sparkling white sand. One of the numerous tropical-resort whitesand beaches of his late marriage. And Isabelle close beside him. So long as he did not look at her, she would remain. Warm oiled supple woman's body, the sunlit smell. When he opened his eyes, blinking, Isabelle was gone. But the dazzling sand remained. Blinding sand. An island of pain from which he kicked off, swam away in cool caressing turquoise waters and returned; returned to the sparkling, dazzling pain and kicked off again, swam away again and again returned. Always, he returned.

A woman's deft fingers were fitting a thick, snug collar around his neck through which (Temple gradually gathered) hot water coursed. Fifteen minutes. Temple sweated, panted, observed his pain draining away, the tension dissolving like melting ice. His eyes filled with moisture. He was not crying, but his vision swam. Panting with happiness, hope. The young female therapist in white stood beside the table making notations on a clipboard. Only now did Temple cast a sidelong glance at her—she was probably in her mid-20s, slender, smallboned, with dark, thick-lashed eyes and a narrow, thin-tipped nose. Her complexion wasn't perfect, yet it wasn't exactly blemished—tiny pimples at her hairline, like a rash. She had sensitive skin, so what? Not the smooth, poreless cosmetic mask of glamorous Isabelle and her glamorous female friends.

"Are you feeling better, Mr. Temple?"

"I am."

"You were terribly tense when you came in, but you did relax finally."

"I did."

Temple spoke heartily. He wanted to cry, to burst into laughter. Wanted to seize Gina about her slender hips, and bury his heated face against her. Life seemed suddenly so simple, so good.

•

He went away with a set of instructions for exercises to do at home and an appointment with Gina for the morning after next. Secretly, he planned not to return—the sessions were $95 for 55 minutes! And he certainly wasn't going to see Dunbar again in a week, as Freddie wanted. You don't get to be a millionaire several times over by wasting good money.

•

"Why? To help people, I guess. To play a role in a person's recovery."

At this second therapy session Gina spoke more readily. Gently but forcibly she stretched Temple's neck, massaged the "soft tissue" at the base of his skull, secured him into the remarkable hot-pack collar through which steaming water coursed nourishing as blood. ("Is it tight enough? Is it too tight?" There was something disturbingly intimate, even erotic, about being trussed up in the thing. Just a little more pressure on his neck arteries and Temple's entire head would be tumescent.) Partly Temple was quizzing Gina to distract himself from his misery, and partly it was Temple's habit to quiz strangers who intrigued him—How do you live? What is your life? Is there some secret to your life that might help me? But also he was fascinated by the girl. Waking the previous night from restless dreams, a dream riddled with pain like pelting raindrops, he saw someone standing silently beside his bed. She reached out to touch him, calm him with her ivorycool fingers. They were such strong fingers.

Gina was saying earnestly, "I have wanted to be a physical therapist since—oh, sixth grade, maybe. Our teacher went around the room asking us what we wanted to do when we grew up, and I said, 'Help sick people get better.' There was a cousin of mine, a boy, who had cystic fibrosis. I've always wished I could have helped him walk. For a while I wanted to be a nurse, then a doctor—but they don't really play a role in a person's recovery, over a period of time, like a physical therapist does." How proudly she spoke, in her shy way.

Play a role. A curious expression. It evoked a world in which people played roles in one another's lives and had no lives of their own except for these roles. Maybe it made sense, Temple thought. What is an actor apart from a play? You can't just be—brute raw existence 24 hours a day.

"I never knew that I wanted to be anything, I guess," Temple said, bemused. Except a winner. "It's like, well, falling in love. A life can just happen." Cut the crap! Who was angling, negotiating, push-push-pushing to make it happen? "Uh, how many patients do you see (continued on page 154) Physical (continued from page 108) here, Gina, every day?" Temple tried, in the exigency of the hot-pack collar, to keep his voice level, casual.

"Oh, eight, maybe ten a day. It varies."

"Eight! Ten!" Temple felt a stab of jealousy. He didn't want to think it was sexual jealousy. When he had arrived that morning he'd caught a glimpse of Gina's nine o'clock patient—at least he thought the guy was Gina's patient—a bearish young man of about 30 with sullen, handsome features, wearing a neck brace, walking unsteadily with a cane. Football player's physique, but the look in the poor bastard's eyes was not one you associated with the sport of football. Temple had looked quickly away, shuddering. "And do you work every day?"

Gina hesitated, as if the questioning was becoming too personal.

"Well—most weeks, yes. I don't like holidays. People need their therapy." She spoke almost primly.

"And what are your hours?"

Again she hesitated. Flat on his back, Temple could see the girl only obliquely: the dark hair, the set of her jaw. Was she frowning? Quickly she answered, "Monday-Wednesday-Friday, eight to one; Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, one to six."

Temple said with forced exuberance, "That's symmetry!"

"What?"

Gina had removed the hot-pack collar—too bad!—and now Temple was sitting up, steeling himself against pain. Next came the dreaded neck side-bends: Retract chin, lower head slowly to the right shoulder, hold for a count of three, raise head, now the left shoulder, repeat, repeat. Gina's deft fingers were there to help, exerting pressure so that Temple could maintain the tremulous position. She hadn't really heard Temple's remark, and he didn't repeat it.

Just like Isabelle. Like any woman. If you get abstract with them too quickly they turn vague, uneasy. Even the most harmless, playful abstraction.

Temple had tried to stay away. He'd tried. Endured two wretched nights before giving in. The unpredictability of the pain, as well as its severity, had frightened him. And he'd discovered from examining the institute bill that where he'd been thinking neck, he ought to have been thinking spine. His official classification was cervical spine strain. That was sobering.

Next, on his stomach, sweating forehead pressed against a rolled towel. Temple felt chastened anew. One thing about the therapy unit—you were all body here. Attempting "push-ups" from the head: God, how clumsy! A rod of molten-white pain in his neck. He was dizzily aware of Gina's slender hips and thighs in the white slacks close by his elbow. She murmured words of encouragement such as one might murmur to a child being potty-trained.

Next on his back, panting. Winded like a horse. But not wanting to lose control entirely, Temple remarked he thought he'd seen Gina a few nights before—"out at the mall, at my theater?"

"Theater?" This attracted her attention. Like a lovely silvery fish rising to the bait.

"The Cinemapolis, out at the mall. I own it."

Gina was making detailed notations on her clipboard. Temple waited for her to respond, glance at him impressed. Hey, you're somebody of importance after all. Most people did, even those who should know better. Certainly, most women. As if, being a vendor of movies, Temple was associated with Hollywood glamour.

Gina said with a flicker of interest, unless it was merely a young person's politeness to an elder, "You own the Cinemapolis, Mr. Temple?"

"You could call me Larry, actually."

Gina led Temple into the next exercise, stretching a length of oddly fire-engine-red rubber diagonally across his body, shoulder to hip. It should have been easy, except each time Temple moved a jolt of pain illuminated his neck and upper spine like an X ray. He said, panting, "I—I've been doing a lot of flying lately. To L.A. and back. Sometimes business, sometimes personal. My former wife remarried and moved to Santa Monica." He heard those words with a kind of horror, as if they were issuing from a voice box. "Dr. Dunbar thought I might've picked up an airborne virus in a plane. A neck muscle was infected."

"That can occur." Gina spoke solemnly. Occur seemed purposefully chosen, a clinician's word, out of a textbook. She said, "Once the muscle spasms, if the tissue has been overstretched, it can take a while to heal."

Casually Temple asked, "How much of a while?"

"Oh, I wouldn't want to say."

"Weeks?" Silence. "Months?"

"Dr. Dunbar might have an estimate."

Temple had a quick sense of the position of a young therapist, an hourlywage earner, in the hierarchy of the Saddle Hills Neck & Back Institute. Not for Gina to overstep her authority.

"It wouldn't be—years. Would it?"

Gina said in a lowered voice, though she and Temple were alone together, "Sometimes you see a person who can't hold or move his head normally? The pain is so severe?"

"Yes?"

"It might be someone who let the pain go for so long, not wanting to see a doctor—it can be too late."

"Too late?"

"To do much about the pain. You have to catch it in time."

Catch pain in time. Now there was a thought!

"This poor man who's my patient now," Gina said, "he let his back go for 20 years! Imagine. He thought it would go away by itself. Now it never will." Gina sighed. "I feel bad, there's so little I can do for him."

Absentmindedly she dabbed at Temple's flushed face where sweat ran in oily rivulets like tears.

•

There was Temple floating on his island of pain. Dazzling white sand. And him flat upon it, fearful of moving, in the arm-flung legflung posture of a child making a snow angel. The turquoise water lapped close by, but Temple couldn't get to it. There was a shape beside him, warm and nudging. One of those teases: They can touch you, but you don't dare touch in turn. Don't dare look.

Suddenly he was walking somewhere, approaching a door marked Pain Management Center. Asleep yet sufficiently awake to register skepticism. What did they take him for, a credulous asshole?

•

It wasn't true that Gina had no last name. Right there on the bill her name was provided in full: Gina LaPorta.

There were several listings for LaPorta in the telephone directory. G. LaPorta in Saddle Hills Junction. Sleepless, damned neck aching, Temple drove by night in his ghostly glimmering-white BMW past the address—a stucco-facade apartment building on Eldwood Avenue. He didn't park but slow-cruised around the block. Deserted night streets of a part of town he'd known only as a onetime potential investor in some condominium properties. (He hadn't invested, fortunately.) It wasn't like Temple to behave this way, like a lovesick kid, weird behavior. But he was curious about Gina. Just curious. Wondered if she was living with someone. The telephone directory didn't provide much help. He'd noticed a ring on her left hand, not a wedding band nor a conventional engagement ring, turquoise and silver. But these days you couldn't tell—she might be married. Might even have a kid. Physical life—what a mystery! More mysterious than money, even, Temple had discovered.

First birds singing already?—only 4:40 a.m. There were cars parked at the curb on both sides of Eldwood Avenue, and Temple saw, or believed he saw, Gina's little canary-yellow Ford Escort among them. He'd found out from her, in a casual exchange, what kind of car she drove, and he'd checked it out in the institute parking lot, at the rear. Economy car, compact and cute. And Temple's regal white BMW easing past, the motor near soundless. Temple finished the lukewarm Molson he'd been gripping between his knees as he drove. Something melancholy about night ending before you were ready. Always a melancholy tinge to the eastern sky when you've been awake with your solitary thoughts all night. Cruising the block, circling just one more time.

•

"Have you been doing your exercises, Mr. Temple?"

"More or less, yes."

"Has the pain lessened?"

"Definitely."

It wasn't exactly a lie. If Temple didn't move abruptly, or crane his neck forward, as he had a natural tendency to do, in conversation with shorter people—especially attractive women—he scarcely knew the pain was there. Although, like a dial tone radiating up into his head, it was perpetually there. Too exuberantly he said, "I'm 1000 percent improved, Gina, thanks to you."

She blinked at him, startled, her face colored in faint, uneven patches, like sunburn.

"Well—maybe just 800 percent," Temple said wryly, rubbing his neck.

Before his appointment, Temple had wandered about the institute building. On the mezzanine floor he'd discovered a door marked Sports Medicine Center and, at the end of a corridor, another door marked Pain Management Center. So it was real! He'd invented what was merely real.

Each time Temple stepped into the physical therapy clinic its dimensions became smaller, friendlier. On his first visit, he'd been confused by the mirrors that lined most of the walls and suggested an infinity of gleaming nightmare machines and hapless, anonymous people. But there were in fact just 25 machines, sleek stainless steel and black. There were six large mats on the polished tile floor, kept spotlessly clean. There were nine tables in the open clinic—more precisely, as Gina called them, plinths. There were racks of dumbbells, yellow and blue plastic balls of varying sizes. There was the shimmering aqua pool beyond the glass partition Temple looked through with longing. But Dunbar hadn't prescribed for him any swimming therapy, yet.

Of course, Temple was beginning to recognize certain of his fellow patients and guessed they were beginning to recognize him. No names here at the clinic, just faces. And symptoms. It seemed to Temple he'd been in therapy for weeks, months! In fact, it was only Monday morning of his second week.

At the reception desk he'd glanced anxiously about, not seeing Gina at first. Then he saw her doing paperwork at a desk. She looked up and smiled, and his heart lifted. This morning a ceramic barrette in her thick mahogany-dark hair and the turquoise ring prominent on her finger.

Temple's therapy began with the usual stretching and massage. Temple lay flat on the padded table—plinth—which he found almost comfortable now. He said, "The secret of happiness I think is to simplify your life, you know? My life has become simplified in recent years. When you're married and things are offkilter, life can be, well, complex." A pause. It was as if Temple's voice issued from his throat of its own capricious volition. "You're engaged, Gina?"

"Engaged? No."

"That ring."

"It isn't an engagement ring. Just a ring." Gina laughed sharply as if Temple had pushed too far. She retreated to the other side of the plinth. "Now sit up, Mr. Temple, please. We'll do neck rotation, three sets of ten." Neck rotation! When Temple flinched at the pain, Gina said reprovingly, "This time rotate in the direction of the pain. Into the pain. It should centralize, or decrease. Try." He tried. He didn't want to disappoint her. His face was flushed like a tomato about to burst. He said suddenly, "You've helped me so much, Gina. You've given me hope."

Gina murmured, quite embarrassed, "Well."

Again, on his back. Then on his stomach, forehead pressed against a rolled towel. Through a haze of pain he heard himself say, unexpectedly, "My ex-wife is ex. I mean literally. She has died." How strange that sounded, like an awkward translation: She has died. Temple amended, "I mean—she's dead. Isabelle is dead now."

There was a blank, systolic moment. "I'm sorry," Gina said.

Temple said, "Thank you." He was going to say I miss her but instead said, as if it were a subtle, comic refutation of Gina's solicitude, "The alimony payments ended years ago"—an awkward joke, if it was a joke. It fell upon Gina's somber silence.

•

The therapy continued. Again, Temple was sitting up. It was crucial for him to maintain perfect posture, yet, oddly, the pain seemed to be pushing him out of alignment. He repeated, tasting the words, "My wife is dead. I could have gone to the funeral, but I wouldn't have felt welcome. Ex-wife, I mean. In fact, it's a double-ex. Gone first, and then dead. Pancreatic cancer. It's hard to believe a woman like that—you'd have had to know her. I couldn't believe when I first heard. Next, she was in the hospital. I mean, by the time I heard, she was already in. I flew out to see her, but----" What the hell was he saying? Why? His manner was affable, sane, matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing a business deal; crucial for the other party to know that things were under control. It was the first time he'd uttered the remarkable words My wife is dead.

He was saying, with an air not of complaint but wonder, "My 20-year-old son is a dropout from Stanford and he's in a drug rehabilitation center in La Jolla—I think. He hasn't spoken to me in five years except to ask for money." Temple laughed to show he wasn't at all hurt, nor even much surprised.

Again Gina murmured, "I'm sorry," not knowing what else to say, frowning and looking away from Temple, picking at a reddened bump on the underside of her chin.

"I'm sorry," Temple said. "But I don't let it affect my outlook on life."

Next was the hot-pack collar, tight around his neck as he could bear. The eerie sensation of floating: feeling pain drain from his neck and skull like needles being extracted from flesh. Temple began to speak expansively, like a levitating man. A crisis had been met, and overcome. "Gina, suppose a man were to come into the clinic here, as your patient. He came three times a week as his doctor prescribed, and he was desperate to get well, and you got to like him—not just feel sorry for him, I mean, but like him—and he liked you; and he asked was it possible you might see him sometime, outside the clinic, where he wasn't a patient and you weren't his therapist? What then?"

Gina didn't reply at first. She'd moved out of Temple's line of vision, and he had only a vague, blurry sense of her. "Is this a made-up story, or what?" She laughed sharply.

Temple said, "I'll continue. This man, your hypothetical patient—actually, he'd seen you, without knowing your name, of course, before he became your patient. Once at the mall, possibly, or downtown—and at a property in the Junction, on Eldwood Avenue, that he'd been looking into as an investment. Isolated, accidental times. He wasn't looking for you, just happened to see you. And a few weeks or months later he develops a mysterious neck pain, and his doctor prescribes physical therapy, and he walks into the clinic and sees you—just by chance. And he's excited, and anxious. He wonders, Is a patient allowed to request a therapist, not knowing her name, or is that against regulations, would it be perceived as unprofessional? So he doesn't say anything, but he's assigned to you anyway! And he thinks—oh God, he thinks—if, if only----" Temple paused, breathing quickly. He was concerned too much adrenaline might be flooding his veins.

Gina, out of sight, remained silent. Temple believed he could hear her quick, shallow breathing.

"Hey, it's only a story," he said. "You're right, Gina—it's made up."

Gina said quietly, "Excuse me, Mr. Temple."

She left the room, shut the door. In a paroxysm of embarrassment, unless it was mortal shame, Temple lay as motionless as a man fallen from a great height, in terror of testing whether he can move. Gina had gone to get the clinic manager! She had gone to inform Dunbar!

Steaming water coursed through the choking-tight collar. The hydrocollator, as it was called, $35 per session, was timed to run for 15 minutes. Temple shut his eyes. He was doing the dead man's float. Close about him was the dazzling blinding-white-sand island and the shimmering turquoise water, and he seemed, in his misery, to be enveloped by each simultaneously. What a way to treat a man who loves you. Crazy for you, and what did I ever get out of it?

He must have slept. Didn't hear the door open behind him, or close. There came Gina's deft cool fingers against his neck, undoing the collar. She had returned, as if nothing had happened? Therapy would continue, as if nothing had happened? "Forgive me—I got a little carried away," Temple said. Gina was helping him sit upright. He was dazed, dizzy. The heat of the collar had spread through his body. Now came neck sidebends, and more pain: Retract the chin, lower head toward right shoulder slowly, hold one-two-three; relax, return, repeat with left shoulder. Three times, sets of ten. There came Gina's steady hand on the side of his head, pressing gently downward, when Temple faltered. Zigzag bolts of pain shot upward into his skull, downward into his chest. You'd almost expect jeering, blipping sounds to accompany them, as in a kid's video game. Gina cautioned, "Retract your chin farther, Mr. Temple. You can hurt yourself in this exercise if you don't."

Temple was thinking: She had gone away, and she'd considered his story. She was an intelligent young woman who could make the distinction between fiction and life, fable and fact. She could see that Temple was a worthy man. Obviously well intentioned, decent. Possibly a troubled man, but it was nothing he couldn't handle. (Was it?) If she had been a normally curious young woman, she might have noted her patient's address on the paperwork, might even have noticed his BMW, made certain calculations. You wouldn't blame a woman—investments have to be worth the risk. Gina could foresee, surely, Temple's kindness? His affection and desperation in about equal measure? She could foresee—but Temple's vision began to blur, as in a dream rising abruptly to daylight, about to go out.

Temple lay another time on his back, winded. Gina resumed her position behind him, massaging the neck and upper shoulder muscles that were knotty and gnarled as aged tree roots. He shivered with pain and hoped she wouldn't notice. He didn't want to disappoint her. Hesitantly he opened his eyes, and there was Gina's flushed face above him, upside down. Strain lines at her eyes, her mouth pursed. Skin heated with emotion, and she'd picked the tiny bump on the underside of her chin to bleeding. Maybe she wasn't as young as he'd thought. Thirty? Or more? He smiled happily, and it seemed to him that Gina smiled—anyway, almost. "Be serious, Mr. Temple," she said severely, fingers digging into his flesh. "You're in pain."

He shut his eyes, terribly embarrassed. Flat like this, on his back, he felt—unmanned.

Gina led Temple into stretching a length of oddly fire-engine-red rubber diagonally across his body.