By Micki L. Bailey

Chloe's hair was shoulder-length, straight, and pale-blond. The color of white roses or antique lace. "Ivory," she called it. And she was quick in telling you that this striking color had not previously been in a bottle on a shelf. But she was never crass enough to tilt her head forward and show you an absence of dark roots.

She glanced up and across the desk at the black man. He was, of course, looking at her, silently and without expression. She sometimes supposed that this habit of his had been learned. How could he otherwise restrain the laughter, the disgust, and the astonishment at some of the things she said over here on this side of the desk? Or maybe this silence was supposed to encourage her freedom to speak her mind. It was her mind in question here, wasn't it?

He reminded her of Denzel Washington, and that image brought up Malcolm X, and that image brought up Spike Lee with droopy eyelids on the "Arsenio Hall Show," and that image brought up Danny Aiello, and then she was wondering why in Do The Right Thing did Spike's character throw that trashcan through Aiello's character's pizza parlor window and start that huge, fatal brouhaha. Did anyone else who saw the movie expect him to do that, or was everyone shocked too? Didn't he have enough influence on both sides to have stopped what was about to happen? Or did he realize it was all inevitable anyway? She never figured that out. And she had seen the film twice.

"Ms. Merchant, would you like to share your thoughts with me?" The man broke her reverie.

"Well, what I'm thinking right now is how school teachers say to students that whisper in class, 'Would you like to share that with the rest of the class?'" Chloe smiled a little, but the man did not.

"Oh, I'm just teasing with you," she went on, mischievously. "Luke used to say I was 'disconcerting' when I teased like that. And I'd tell him that's why he had no number one hits 'cause he wrote songs with big, confusing words in them."

And then Luke Hatfield became the subject of the moment, as he had been many times before.

"Have you talked to him lately?" The man asked her this about Luke every time. He knew she hadn't, but he seemed to want to hear what she'd say.

One day she'd responded with a long, credible story about getting back together with Luke, planning to live together in a little house in the suburbs, adjusting her corporate "daytime" schedule to accommodate his "nighttime" entertainment lifestyle, attending all the band's nightly practice sessions. The whole nine yards. She told him she was trying to get pregnant 'cause Luke had mentioned wanting "an heir." She'd said she would be doing publicity work for the band and that Luke was going to therapy for his strong affinity for the girlie groupies whom had always been THE PROBLEM. And when she finally finished painting this big, fake picture with a face full of joy, the man had said, "And so this will solve all your miseries?"

Chloe had broken down then. Her facade was shattered. The waves had sloshed roughly over the elaborate sand castle that wasn't real. None of those lies had been true, and even if they were, her problems would still live. Luke would never lose his helpless attraction to the sweet, young things that adoringly crowded the stage footlights every time he played. As many times as she and Luke had tried to make things work, as assured as she'd been that "this time would be different," as much as she'd loved him, there was always a little cutie in a dorm room or somewhere to dash Chloe's world on the rocks. "These are the rocks of rock-n-roll," she'd say. She knew now this one thing would never change. She had sobbed uncontrollably that day.

So now when the man asked her each time if she'd talked to Luke lately, she'd give the correct answer.

"Hell no! They're playing on the road in the midwest. They'll probably find time to swing through Portland too so he can hook up with his penpal there. Can you believe he's actually got 'em strung out nationally? Maybe if the band could get every girl Luke's ever boinked to buy a CD, maybe they'd be rich and famous." The man said nothing.

Chloe looked down at her purse on the floor. It made her introspective to talk about Luke. Two years now of life without him, only hearing him on the college radio stations. It still saddened her to remember that "era." She thought even now that what went on then had ruined her for anything else in her life. There had been a ring, a beautiful diamond Luke had found in Baltimore. She wondered now what else Luke had found in Baltimore. And why hadn't the other guys in the band clued her in? Weren't they her friends too? Especially Peter. Apparently, his allegiances had been more to Luke. When the "divorce" had happened, they hadn't split the boys in the band along with the other stuff.

Smiling Luke. A creature of the night world who wrote lovely music seemingly from his soul. Chloe had finally summoned all her courage to let it all go. Luke was not to be her consummate, end-all companion for the rest of time as she'd believed. "Gotta program myself into a different stream," she tried to tell herself. It was just the wrong time, and the dice were loaded from the start, and all that jazz. But she still recalled, after so long now, dancing with him that night in the living room where he lived. No one else was home, and that slow R.E.M. song was on the radio. He'd come into the room with two beers and asked her to dance. And they were moving together, and nothing else was happening anywhere else in the world. And she was feeling his warm, moist cheek against hers. And hearing him whisper, "Ages of this, Chloe. That's what I wish for."

Time stands still in memory.

She forced herself back to the present. A new era was upon her now, and the black man waited patiently for her to resume. Her purse was slightly open. She thought she saw something inside gleam, but she looked up and saw no sunshine out the window to be reflected.

"Damn this rain ... and damn this wasted day," she said slowly.

"But you wore your sunglasses in," he prompted.

"My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades." She looked at him and smiled, teasing again.

She looked out the window again and was silent. A couple of minutes slipped by. She heard the words to a Tom Petty song: "Somewhere, somehow somebody musta kicked you around some."

Then her eyes met his. "Wasn't Othello black?" "Yes, I believe he was," he answered calmly.

"Well, did you know that Byron, Lord Byron, and Shelley were buddies? And that Bob Dylan took his name from Dylan Thomas, the 'no man is an island' guy?" She was excited now, struggling desperately to get up out of the reflective mood. She didn't wait for him to answer the barrage of questions. "What do you think Helen of Troy, formerly Queen of Sparta, really looked like? Cindy Crawford maybe? Do you suppose Prince and Michael Jackson ever talk on the phone? Oh, who did you like better? Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton?"

"You're agitated, Ms. Merchant. Let's do something to ease the stress. Or maybe rechannel the energy." It seemed he had not heard any of her queries.

She hesitated, then said, "Let's do something to save this wasted day." She was still staring out the window. She hated the rain.

"What do you suggest?"

"Oh, something terribly exciting, delightfully atrocious." Chloe swung her fine hair out of her face. "Once Jeff and I, he's my brother, you know, once we went in the ladies' room of a restaurant and locked all the stalls and crawled under them. He was young enough to go in there with me, see. And then we came back out all innocent-like and watched as lots of ladies went in and came right back out fast and looking confused. It was a blast. We never got caught." Her eyes were shining and far away; she was five years old again. "We were in Atlantic City, I think. A place with casinos. My dad, he's a gambler, you know."

Chloe's mind filled with huge images of the casino. Black-jack tables where the action was as fast as the rate at which you could lose your cash flow. The beautiful roulette wheel, and the craps. Ah, the craps, she thought. The dice were loaded from the start, huh, Luke? Oh, I guess I knew that, but I rolled them anyway. I bet, and I rolled those fateful dice. And then you exploded into my heart. And now look what's become of me. I'm a 25-year old emotional misfit. Even childhood memories lead my mind back to you. And I'm sitting here in this nice office, like I do twice every week of my mixed up life, telling this man all about it, and I don't feel myself anymore, and I wish you would just get out of my soul so I can get on with the real deal, and---"

"Did you want to go on about locking the bathroom stalls?" The man broke in again.

"What?" Chloe was disoriented.

"You were telling tales of mischief."

"Oh. Yeah." She got out the high-backed leather chair and walked over to the window. The steady rain beat against the glass.

"I read somewhere that loving is the pale shadow of dying." She was talking to the window.

"That gives love a negative connotation," the man answered.

"Well, duh. Love has a negative connotation for me. I'm rather unhappy now because of it." "But do you feel like you're dying?" he asked.

"I sometimes feel like I wish I was dead." She turned to look at him. "And I could just end it all at any time, couldn't I? I mean, I could jump out this window right now, or take four bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol PM. They make them in gelcaps now, so the taste wouldn't gross me out. Right?"

"I'm sure there's a more suitable alternative than causing your own death."

"Yes, I guess you're absolutely correct. That's why you're here, right? So I can open up all this torment and grief and quite possibly achieve a stable psyche once again? I mean, wouldn't it be, uh, sacrilegious if somebody actually, how did you put it, caused their own death right here in your office?"

"Ms. Merchant, I'd like to steer you away from thoughts of suicide. Do you have a pleasant memory you'd like to talk about? Or maybe some plans for this weekend?"

Chloe came back to the chair and sat down. She picked up her purse and shoved it beside her. She smelled the leather of the chair and wondered how it had become royal blue. Then she felt like Holden Caufield when he'd wondered where the ducks go in the winter. She did not enjoy feeling THE PAIN. Especially here during a session. This was the place where THE PAIN was supposed to recede. At least for an hour or two. So she decided to push THE PAIN away and create a better attitude. It was easy. She'd done it before.

"I'm going skiing this weekend. With some friends. It'll be a blast." She was excited and animated again. She felt something very hard inside her purse as she sat up on the edge of the chair.

"Skiing?" The man raised his eyebrows. He seemed glad that she'd lightened up.

"Yeah. In Vail. Snow's beautiful there. Hope I don't fall and crack my head open. Maybe I'll meet a suave, gorgeous ski instructor. Have you ever been?"

Chloe's smile brightened the room. She was a beauty, the black man thought. To see her now, one would never know how much healing she needed.

"No, I've never been skiing. Or to Vail. But it sounds wonderful. Take pictures."

"Oh, sure thing. Maybe even a video. Wouldn't that be cool?" She beamed.

"The cat's meow," he answered.

She sank back into the chair as if she'd been pushed down. With horror on her face. The brightness was gone. She stared at the man as if he'd turned green and grown snakes out of his head. And everything that happened next, he would recall later, seemed to take place in a flash of lightening, a brief second of time.

He had no way of knowing what she was remembering in that brief second of time, what thoughts his last three words had conjured up.

Chloe was feeling that time had stopped. And it had for her. She was catapulted back into the world of Luke Hatfield. The world she constantly tried so hard to leave behind. The world where her misery never took a break, and life was an endless succession of memories, only memories.

And she knew at that moment that for as long as she lived, her life would be this way, never to progress onward past THE PAIN, never again to reach a normal psyche. There is no escape, she realized. Never would it end. It was a joke to pretend she'd be happy again.

Luke was everywhere.

He'd written her a song once to make up after a big row over that girl in Athens, Georgia. And in it, he'd said he'd love her 'til he died, and he'd called her "The Cat's." Not "Cat's Meow," but "The Cat's." A little shortcut to make it a Luke original. He thought he was Orpheus in Hades and could charm his way past anything with his guitar and his magic lyrics. It was her song, all she had left. And that song, of all the thousands of songs he must have written, cut her up inside when she heard it now.

And the doctor had unwittingly shattered all her hopes for achieving normalcy and slammed her back into Luke's memory when he'd said those words.

She was just tired, she thought. Tired of fighting with THE PAIN. Tired of all of it. It didn't help to fight with it, and she hurt too bad when she let it win. There was, perhaps, one final way to save the wasted day.

So she reached into her purse, very quickly and determined, and pulled out the silver straight-edged razor. It snapped open. She brought it up to her pretty throat, exactly to the spot where the medical book had shown the big artery is. And slashed. Fast and effortlessly. And without hesitation. And the blood that had been her life pulsed upwards in arching crimson fountains, covering the blue leather and soaking into her striking ivory hair.