“I don’t let my therapist run my life,” he said. “You know, I go in, I talk to him . . . I think of him as a good bounce. Mainly I go to hear myself think, and sometimes I’ll discover something through what I say. I’ve been seeing him for a lot of years, and we did most of the main thrust of the work on my early family stuff in the beginning. Now it’s just . . . It’s like going in for a brushup, like teeth-cleaning. Anyway, you’re probably not describing this accurately to your shrink, or she wouldn’t object to it. I mean, she doesn’t know me, so she’s not basing her objections on an experience of me but on something you’re telling her. And I think you must have misrepresented this situation, because I don’t think there’s that much wrong with it.”

“Well,” she said. “So the screening is what, Thursday?”

“The Ziz! screening?” he said. “It’s Thursday. You know that. Which one are you coming to, the seven or the nine?”

“Which one are you going to?” she said.

“I’m going to both,” he said. “I’m the producer. Obviously I’m gonna go to both.”

“Well, I’ll go to the late one,” she said. “Are you nervous?”

“I think it’s a fabulous film,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “but what if everybody else doesn’t think so?”

“Well, fuck ’em,” he said. “I think it’s a fabulous film.”

“Remember that line from The Philadelphia Story?” she said. “ ‘To hardly know him is to know him well’? I feel like that’s us, like we’ll just go on and on and on like this, but we’ll never quite get past the incandescence of that first meeting. There’s this sort of dull phosphorousness we maintain now, but . . . I mean, on a certain level, you’re the closest thing to love I have in my life right now, but it’s still far away. The closest thing I have to a relationship is very far away. I think that’s interesting.”

“I’d like to meet someone like you,” he said. “But there’s no one more like you than you.”

“Maybe we can get somebody to introduce us,” she said.

Dreaming Outside Your Head

Suzanne was desperate to do something she felt would legitimize her, or that would be perceived as legitimizing her. Something that would cause her to seem desirable. Ideally, she would accept the marriage proposal of a member of the Royal Family who would renounce his throne for her. Since this was hardly likely, she concentrated on an alternate plan: getting work.