As I had been listening to my second patient describe the nearly daily argument he was having with his wife about what he was absolutely determined was the correct way to load the dishwasher, I had a revelation about Merritt and Madison and Dead Ed.
Ah-ha moments, flashes of insight, although not commonplace, aren’t unexpected in the lives of psychotherapists. Most of the time, though, I apply the brakes of caution and keep the initial glint of percipience to myself. I do this because often I’m plain wrong, and also because there is usually no harm in sitting on the revelations. True insights aren’t perishable; there is no danger in storing them for long periods of time. Sometimes insights even age and improve like good wine. But false insight always injects clutter and misdirection-the construction of an artificial fork in an otherwise meandering but purposeful road.
The truth is that when doing psychotherapy, being right is usually much less important than not being wrong.
I reminded myself of none of these things as I called Miggy Monroe, invited myself over, and asked for directions to her apartment.
I don’t know why I expected a chaotic apartment with ten cats, undusted tchotchkes, and piles of magazines from the Johnson administration, but I did. It’s not what I found.
Miggy Monroe lived in one of the brick midrise buildings on the west end of Arapahoe near Ninth Street. The apartment had a wonderful view of the Flatirons, and Miggy favored contemporary pieces in the colors of the various incarnations of oatmeal: plain, with honey, with milk, with milk and cinnamon.
The only colors in the apartment were the red lines in Miggy’s eyes and the dust-jacketed spines of hundreds of books.
She was surprised I was so young. I was surprised she was so young. I offered my compassion over Madison’s death and she invited me to the funeral to be held two days later. The coroner in Routt County had just released her daughter’s body. Madison’s father was flying in from Humboldt State in California. She thought I would like him. It seemed apparent to me that Miggy still did.
I told her I couldn’t tell her why I needed to know, but I asked if she had yet gone through her daughter’s things.
“Sure, I was hoping for some answers.”
“Find any?”
I thought she hesitated before she shook her head.
I was tempted to dance around my objectives but wasn’t creative enough to find a way to do it. I said, “Did you find any videotapes with her stuff?”
She looked puzzled, said, “No.”
“Is there a collection of tapes the family keeps?”
“There is no family. It was just me and Maddy.”
She wanted me to focus with her on grief. I wanted to find the videotape. I felt like all my compassionate muscles were cramping from overuse. I said, “I’m sorry. Do you have a video camera?”
A hesitant, “Yes. What’s so important about our videos?”
“So you have some tapes, then? Things you’ve recorded over the years-home videos? Maybe some movies you recorded? Prerecorded tapes?”
“Sure. Of course. We used to take lots of videos when she was little. Madison. Not so much lately. Things were difficult lately. She recorded stuff off cable, too. We get HBO.”
“May I see the collection?”
“Of course, I guess. Is this about Merritt? Are you looking for one with Maddy and Merritt on it? I don’t think there are any.” She opened a white lacquer cabinet to reveal a TV and VCR. An interior drawer held about two dozen tapes.
“Yes, it’s about Merritt, but I can’t say any more than that.” I thought about what to do next. I didn’t really want to sit in Miggy’s apartment watching her TV and her VCR while I searched for the videotape of whatever Madison had recorded happening between Merritt and Dead Ed in the rear end of Haldeman.
“May I take these with me, Miggy? Overnight? I need to go through them-I’m looking for something specific-and I don’t want to intrude on you while I do. I’ll return them to you tomorrow, I promise.”
“Even the one you’re looking for?”
“If Madison’s on that one-at all-yes. I’ll return that one, too.”
She was obviously puzzled but too fractured by her grief to press me. She shrugged and said, “Why not? Let me get a shopping bag for you.”
The bag was white, with handles.
Leaving Miggy Monroe’s apartment, I backtracked across Boulder Creek to downtown and picked up a ready-to-bake pizza at Nick-N-Willy’s before I went home. While the oven heated, I salved my guilt and played with Emily without even changing my clothes. I played with her some more while the pizza baked. I knew I was procrastinating. I didn’t want to find the Holiday Rambler tape. I didn’t want to not find the Holiday Rambler tape.
Mostly, I didn’t want to see it.
My theory went like this: Madison’s return trip home to Boulder after she had run away with Brad had been because she had told him about taping Merritt and he was bullying her to retrieve the videotape of Merritt and Robilio, so he could begin his not-too-well-thought-out little extortion scenario with Robilio’s company, MedExcel. Madison, I figured, was having second thoughts about having told him about the blackmail scheme she and Merritt had cooked up and didn’t really want Brad to have the tape, so she had taken a copy of Pretty Woman to him instead, after making him promise not to watch it. But she told Brad it was the one.
Brad, of course, had watched the tape, and found nobody screwing on it but Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. He had beaten Madison viciously for her lie, using the copy of Pretty Woman as a bludgeon.
I shuddered at what might have followed between them, what slight by Madison had caused Brad to turn from batterer to murderer. I suspected that the proximity of Dead Ed’s arsenal made it too convenient for Brad to vent his rage with his finger on a trigger.
To support her subterfuge with Brad, I figured that Madison would have picked a bogus tape of the same category as the real tape: that is, a movie taped off HBO or one of the networks. By my count, the shopping bag that Miggy Monroe had given me contained nine likely suspects.
With a Sunshine Wheat Beer and two slices of Nick-N-Willy’s by my side, I fast-forwarded through snippets of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Waiting to Exhale before finding myself so amused and charmed by Alicia Silver-stone in Clueless that I watched almost half of it.
On the sixth tape, three minutes into Little Women, I found myself looking at Edward Robilio’s ass.
Never in my life have I been so grateful for a pause button.
I’m not offended by dirty movies. Although I can’t always trace the line accurately, I have no problem believing that a demarcation exists somewhere between erotica and obscenity.
At that moment, with Dead Ed’s butt filling the expanse of Lauren’s new big-screen TV in front of me, I was looking at the most pornographic image I had ever laid eyes on. If Edward Robilio managed to play Lazarus and rose from the dead right there in my living room, I would have pulled the videotape from the machine and beaten him back to eternity with it. It would have been the shortest reincarnation on record. He would have been begging me to merely shoot him a couple of times.
I paced the room. I changed clothes. I opened my mail. I put the rest of the pizza in the refrigerator. I checked my voice mail. I finished the beer and considered vodka.
I watched the damn tape.
The interlude in the RV lasted three and one-half minutes. A little over halfway through, Merritt raised her head and looked at the camera with a face so dead it belonged in a wax museum.