Explosion in a Mask Factory 13: Luck and Magic

The therapist (I will name her now, her name is Jackie) gets up and I expect her to open the door and usher me out. Instead she retrieves a book from her desk and puts it before me in the space left vacant by the tissue box. Symmetrical Jackie. The book is The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s 20th Century by Margaret Talbot, daughter of Lyle Talbot, the first of the burned Other Men in episode 2 of Explosion in a Mask Factory.

I say, “I guess you were listening.” She rolls her eyes. There is a folded paper book mark stuck in page five. Printed on the book mark is another academic citation:

The Making and Unmaking of Sense: Gilles Deleuze and the Practice of Creative Philosophy by Helene Frichot

I stare long and hard until Jackie breaks the trance. “Hey, don’t worry about that. Look at the book.”

She has underlined sentences in pencil. I see the words without reading them. Jackie gives a raspy groan. “Ahhh! Jeeze. Here.” She takes the book back and drops her glasses onto her nose to read with a carsick cadence:

“…He led a life of surfaces, and there is, of course, a great loss in that. There were things he never understood—about himself, his wives, his children. He was a great raconteur with a diamond-sharp memory, but the stories he told were all plot. The psychological why of what people had done—left Hollywood in a hurry, abandoned a beautiful wife, drank to excess—was left vague, even the question unasked. When I was a kid, I used to press him for the why, and then eventually I got frustrated and stopped. The thing about living as a pre-psychological, non-introspective person, though, is that when you make a success of yourself, it tends to confirm a belief in luck and magic…”

I say, “How many years did you smoke?”

“Ahhhh Jeeze.”