“Not when I was there. Why?”

I told him about her being Kruse’s assistant. About the loop.

“Welcome to Hollyweird,” he said. But he didn’t sound surprised and I commented on it.

“That’s ’cause I’m not surprised, D. Someone else, maybe, but not her.”

“Why’s that?”

“Truth be told, I always thought she was strange.”

“In what way?”

“Nothing blatant, but something about her just wasn’t set right- like a beautiful painting hung off kilter.”

“You never said anything to me.”

“If I’d told you I thought your girlfriend was iffy in the personality department, would you have listened to me calmly and said, ‘Gee, thanks, Lar’?”

“Nope.”

“Nope is right. Au contraire, you would have been highly pissed off, probably never spoken to me again. No, no, kiddies, Uncle Larry keeps his mouth shut. First rule of therapy: When you’re not sure, say nothing. And I wasn’t sure. It’s not as if I was formally diagnosing her- this was just an impression. Besides, you seemed to be enjoying yourself with her, and I didn’t see you marrying her.”

“Why not?”

“She just didn’t seem the marrying kind.”

“What kind did she seem?”

“The kind you keep on the side and destroy your life over, D. I figured you were too smart for that. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

Pause. He said, “Let me ask you a question and don’t take offense: Was she any good in bed?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Went through the moves but didn’t really dig it?”

I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

“Talking about the loop made me realize who she reminded me of: the porn actresses Kruse used to have in his movies. I met them when I worked for him. Those girls all oozed sex appeal, came on as if they could suck blood out of a rock. But you got the feeling it was just a veneer, something that came off with their makeup. Sensuality wasn’t integrated in their personalities- they knew how to split their feelings from their behavior.”

“Split,” I said. “As in borderline?”

“Exactly. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Sharon was a borderline, or even that all the actresses were. But she and they all had some of that borderline quality to them. Am I on target at all?”

“Bull’s-eye,” I said. “She had typical borderline qualities. All these years I never put it together.”

“Don’t shit on yourself, D. You were sleeping with her- afflicted with severe pussy-blindness. I especially wouldn’t expect you to be diagnosing her. But I’m not surprised she made a fuck film.”

Borderline personality disorder. If Sharon had deserved that diagnosis, I’d flirted with disaster.

The borderline patient is a therapist’s nightmare. During my training years, before I decided to specialize in children, I treated more than my share of them and learned that the hard way.

Or, rather, I tried to treat them. Because borderlines never really get better. The best you can do is help them coast, without getting sucked into their pathology. At first glance they look normal, sometimes even supernormal, holding down high-pressure jobs and excelling. But they walk a constant tightrope between madness and sanity, unable to form relationships, incapable of achieving insight, never free from a deep, corroding sense of worthlessness and rage that spills over, inevitably, into self-destruction.

They’re the chronically depressed, the determinedly addictive, the compulsively divorced, living from one emotional disaster to the next. Bed hoppers, stomach pumpers, freeway jumpers, and sad-eyed bench sitters with arms stitched up like footballs and psychic wounds that can never be sutured. Their egos are as fragile as spun sugar, their psyches irretrievably fragmented, like a jigsaw puzzle with crucial pieces missing. They play roles with alacrity, excel at being anyone but themselves, crave intimacy but repel it when they find it. Some of them gravitate toward stage or screen; others do their acting in more subtle ways.

No one knows how or why a borderline becomes a borderline. The Freudians claim it’s due to emotional deprivation during the first two years of life; the biochemical engineers blame faulty wiring. Neither school claims to be able to help them much.

Borderlines go from therapist to therapist, hoping to find a magic bullet for the crushing feelings of emptiness. They turn to chemical bullets, gobble tranquilizers and antidepressants, alcohol and cocaine. Embrace gurus and heaven-hucksters, any charismatic creep promising a quick fix of the pain. And they end up taking temporary vacations in psychiatric wards and prison cells, emerge looking good, raising everyone’s hopes. Until the next letdown, real or imagined, the next excursion into self-damage.

What they don’t do is change.

Ada Small had once talked to me about it- the only time I can remember hearing anger in her voice:

Stay away from them, Alex, if you want to feel competent. They’ll make you look stupid every time. You’ll work on getting rapport for months, even years, finally think you’ve got it and are ready to do some insight work, maybe get some real change going, and they’ll walk out on you in a minute. You’ll find yourself wondering what you did wrong, questioning if you went into the right profession. It won’t be you- it’s them. They can look terrific one moment, be out on the ledge the next.

Out on the ledge.

More than any other psychiatric patient, borderlines could be counted on to attempt suicide. And to succeed.

“I used to sit around bullshitting with the actresses,” Larry was saying. “Got to know some of them a little and began to understand them- their promiscuity, how they did what they did. From a borderline’s point of view, promiscuity can be a halfway decent adaptation, the perfect split- one man for friendship, another for intellectual stimulation, another for sex. Split, split, split, neat and clean. If you can’t achieve intimacy, it sure beats being lonely. Splitting’s also a great way to cut yourself off from fucking on film and letting guys come all over your face. Just another job. I mean, how else could you do it, then go home and make macaroni and cheese and do the crossword puzzle? The girls admitted it, said when they were on camera it was like watching someone else.”

“Dissociation,” I said.

“Par excellence.”

I thought of all the fragmentation in Sharon’s life. The routinized, ultimately passionless way she made love. The refusal to live with me, with anyone. The detachment with which she’d spoken about her dead parents. Going into a helping profession and seducing her patients. Graduating but never getting her license. That horrible night I’d found her with the twin photo.

I’m their only little girl.

The lies.

The loop.

Hooking up with a sleaze like Kruse.

“Did Kruse ever film his students, Larry?”

“You think he made her do the film?”

“It’s logical. He was her supervisor. He was into porn.”

“I suppose so. Except his weren’t loops- they were half-hour features, color, full sound. Supposed to be marital aids for couples with sexual dysfunction, pseudodocumentaries with a disclaimer at the beginning and some guy who sounds like Orson Welles doing a voice-over narration while the camera zooms in on insertion. Besides, Kruse used actors and actresses. Pros. I never saw a student in any of his stuff.”

“There may have been stuff you didn’t see.”

“I’m sure there was. But do you have any indication he filmed her?”

“No. Just a gut feeling.”

“What do you know about the loop besides the fact that she was in it?”

“Supposed to be a doctor-patient seduction thing. The person who described it to me never saw it himself, and it’s since disappeared.”

“So basically you’re talking thirdhand information- the old telephone game. You know how that kind of thing improves with the telling. Maybe it wasn’t even her.”