Because the Night by James Ellroy Page B

words out slowly. “We’re barely into the session and you start taking command. I had some things I wanted to discuss, things that I’ve had on my mind lately, and you barge right in with questions. I don’t like aggressive behavior.”
    The Doctor collapsed the steeple and clasped his hands. “Yet you’re attracted to aggressive men.”
    â€œYes, but what does that have to do with it?”
    Havilland slumped forward in his chair. “Touché, Linda. But let me state my case before I apologize. You’re paying me a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour, which you can afford because you earn a great deal of money doing something you despise. I see this therapy as an exercise in pure pragmatism: Find out why you’re a hooker, then terminate the therapy. Once you stop hooking you won’t need me or be able to afford me, and we’ll go our separate ways. I feel for your dilemma, Linda, so please forgive my haste.”
    Linda felt a little piece of her heart melt at the brilliant man’s apology. “I’m sorry I barked,” she said. “I know you’re on my side and I know your methods work. So … in answer to your question, yes, I do have an active fantasy life.”
    â€œWill you elaborate?” Havilland asked.
    â€œAbout six years ago I posed for a series of clothed and semi-nude photographs that ultimately became this arty-farty coffee table book. There was this awful team of gay photographers and technicians, and they posed me in front of air conditioners to blow my hair and give me goose bumps and beside a heater to make me sweat buckets, and they turned me and threw me around like a rag doll, and it was worse than fucking a three hundred pound drunk.”
    â€œAnd?” Havilland whispered.
    â€œAnd I used to fantasize murdering those fags and having someone film it, then renting a big movie theatre and filling it with girls in the Life. They’d applaud the movie and applaud me like I was Fellini.”
    The Doctor laughed. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIs that a recurring fantasy?”
    â€œWell … no …”
    â€œBut variations of it recur?”
    Linda smiled and said, “You should have been a cop, Doctor. People would tell you whatever you wanted to know. Okay, there’s this sort of upbeat version of the movie fantasy. You don’t have to be a genius to see that it derives from my parents’ deaths. I’m behind a camera. A man beats a woman to death, then shoots himself. I film it, and it’s real and it isn’t real. What I mean is, of course what happens is real, only the people aren’t permanently dead. That’s how I justify the fantasy. What I think I—”
    The Doctor cut in: “Interpret the fantasy.”
    â€œLet me finish!” Linda blurted out. Lowering her voice she said, “I was going to say that somehow it all leads to love. These real or imaginary or whatever people die so that I can figure out what my fucked-up childhood meant. Then I meet this big, rough-hewn man. A lonely, no-bullshit type of man. He’s had the same kind of life as me and I show him the film and we fall in love. End of fantasy. Isn’t it syrupy and awful?”
    Looking straight at the Doctor, Linda saw that his features had softened and that his eyes were an almost translucent light brown. When he didn’t answer, she got up and walked over to the framed diplomas on the wall. On impulse, she asked, “Where’s your family, Doctor?”
    â€œI don’t really have a family,” Havilland said. “My father disappeared when I was an adolescent and my mother is in a sanitarium in New York.”
    Turning to face him, Linda said, “I’m sorry.”
    â€œDon’t be sorry, just tell me what you’re feeling right now.”
    Linda laughed. “I feel like I want a cigarette. I quit eight months ago, one of