1

Matrimony and firefighting. They ain't for cowards.

—Pete McMullen, shortly after his first divorce

YOU MARRIED?"

I hadn't known Larry Hunt thirty-five minutes before he popped the question. But the fact that he was scowling at me as if I were the devil's handmaiden suggested our relationship would never work. The fact that he was sitting beside his wife also posed a problem for our connubial bliss. Weighing all the signs, I guessed they'd been married for about twenty-four years.

But I'm not a psychic. I'm a psychologist. I used to be a cocktail waitress, which paid about the same and boasted a saner clientele, but it kept me on my feet too much.

Two weeks prior, Mrs. Hunt had called my clinic to schedule a therapy session. My practice, L.A. Counseling, is located on the south side of Eagle Rock, only a few miles from Pasadena, but hell and gone from the glamour of New Year's morning's Rose Bowl Parade.

As a result of that call, Mr. Hunt now seemed to be wondering how the hell he had landed in some shrink's second-rate office, and had decided to fill his fifty minutes by probing into my personal life. But I suspected what he really wanted to know was not whether I was married, but what made me think I was qualified to counsel him and his heretofore silent wife.

"No, Mr. Hunt, I'm not married," I said.

"How come?"

If he hadn't been a client, I might have told him it was none of his damned business whether I was married, ever had been married, or ever intended to be married. Ergo, it was probably best that he was a client, since that particular answer might have seemed somewhat immature and just a tad defensive. Not that I secretly long for matrimony or anything, but if someone wants to lug salt downstairs to the water softener for me now and again, I won't spit in his eye. Even my thirty-seventh ex-boyfriend, Victor Dickenson, sometimes called "Vic the Dick" by those who knew him intimately, had been able to manage that much.

"Larry," Mrs. Hunt chided. She was a smallish woman with sandpaper-blond hair and a lilac pantsuit. Her stacked platform sandals were of a different generation than her clothing and made me wonder if she had a disapproving daughter who had taken it upon herself to update her mother's footwear. Her eyes were sort of bubblelike, reminding me of the guppies I'd had as a kid, and when she turned her gaze in my direction it was pretty obvious she'd been wondering about me herself.

It's not uncommon for clients to think a therapist has to be half a couple in order to know something about marriage. I soundly disagree. I've never been a lobster, but I know they taste best with a pound of melted butter and a spritz of lemon.

I didn't have a lot of information about the Hunts, but I knew from their client profiles that Kathy was forty-three, four years younger than her husband, who worked for a company called "Mann's Rent 'n' Go." They both sat on my comfy, cream-colored couch, but to say that they sat together would have been a wild flight of romantic fancy. Between Mrs. Hunt's polyester pantsuit and Mr. Hunt's stiff-backed personage, there was ample space to drive a MAC truck, flatbed trailer and all.

I gave them both my professional smile, the one that suggests I'm above being insulted by forays into my personal life and that I would not murder them in their sleep for doing so.

"You're an okay-looking woman," Mr. Hunt continued. "Got a good job. How come you're still single?"

I considered telling him that, despite past relationships with men like himself, I had managed to retain a few functioning brain cells. But that might have been considered unprofessional. It might also have been untrue.

"How long have you two been married?" I asked, turning his question aside with the stunning ingenuity only a licensed psychoanalyst could have managed. It was five o'clock on a Friday evening, and I hadn't had a cigarette for five days and nineteen hours. I'd counted on my way to work that morning.

Copyright © 2006 by Lois Greiman