Page 29 - WTP Vol.X #8

her sudden awareness that she, too, wanted more. According to her, she went through men the way some women go through clothes, their initial charm as ephemeral as a night-blooming cereus. Therapy, she said, was a last-ditch attempt to deal with her demons. “It’s my father’s fault,” she mumbled. “He devours women as if they were appetizers.”
Nini arched an eyebrow. “I see.” ~
Livy’s father was a television screenwriter and an amateur magician. Not as good as Penn and Teller, Livy admitted, but pretty damn good. At ten, he had trained her to be his assistant. By fifteen, when she was tall for her age with a twenty-year-old’s body,
he took her to cocktail parties, the Emmys and the Oscars. “I felt like I was his partner, not my mother.
I adored him.” Nini heard the soft, snipping sound Livy made when she snapped her middle finger with her thumb. This was a habit, Nini would soon learn, that meant Livy worried she’d said too much. “I still do,” she said. “My parents are miserable together. My brother can’t stand my father and says I’m a suck up. Other than magic, I’m all my father’s got.” She rested her chin in the cup of her hand and stared at Nini. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Thirty-nine years. And why is your inability to commit your father’s fault?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here, Dr. P. That’s what I’m paying you for, right?”
Nini noted the choice of name and wondered what it said about her new patient: a need to be special, an oppositional streak, something else entirely? “You give me too much credit. I don’t have the answers. But I do believe we can figure them out together. So, let’s begin with you. What do you think your father had to do with it?”
Livy wiggled around in her seat and swung her legs over the edge of her chair. “I was like his girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong, he never laid a hand on me. Not
once. I trust him. But he aways confided in me, told me things he shouldn’t. Plus he sleeps around. Not such a great role model. My brother’s thirty-one, only three years older than me, and already on his second wife. My mother’s always on the edge of divorce.”
“So you think you’re just like your father?”
Livy looked at Nini as if she were an idiot. “I know I’m like my father. We’re magicians.” Her face lit up,
her blue eye sparkled. “My mother and brother
like numbers and facts. To them, shooting stars
are nothing but meteors, numbers always add up,
a firefly’s glow is simply a chemical reaction.” She stopped and seemed to drift away. “Things that shimmer beneath the surface or refuse to be bound by language scare them. They crave predictability, consistency, logic. My father and I believe in magic.”
“Well, there’s no magic in therapy. Not in my office. Just hard work and the truth.”
“You don’t like magic?” Livy looked so stricken that Nini wondered if she’d just blown the session.
“Frankly, I don’t know much about it,” she said, keeping her expression blank.
“That would be worse than you believing in penis envy,” Livy said. “You’d be just like my mother.”
~
Despite their uneasy beginning, Livy returned, and for the next two years she recounted stories about her father.
He’d taught her to do magic at three and to ride a unicycle at four. He’d come to all of her plays, including Aesop’s fable in which she played the tortoise. When she got an F in algebra, he swore her drawings were worth more than any equation, and
in fights with her mother, which happened often in Livy’s adolescence, he took her side and told her fury made her beautiful. Perhaps they were too close, Livy speculated. Maybe that was the reason her mother didn’t like her.
It took Livy eight months to tell Nini that he dressed her in form-fitting pants and low-cut dresses when she assisted him, and once made her wear a silver sequined gown slit almost up to her crotch at the Oscars. When Nini explained that it was especially difficult for a child whose abusive parent was also the more loving one, Livy blew up at her use of the word
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