Prompt: What are you passionate about?
REAL author's note - I apologise for posting these 'sessions' between Goren and his shrink all out of order. This is just the way they are coming out of my head.
Paper Weight
A/N This annotated extract from tapes of our third session together illustrates the spiralling nature of my conversations with Detective Goren. It is my intention to use these notes at a later date, should I need to explain a request for additional sessions with him.
Goren and I have been circling each other warily for two and a half sessions now, each seeking the advantage; some prize jewel of intimate knowledge of each other. We're well matched. I ask a question and he seems to answer it - it's only when I listen to the tapes afterwards that I realise he has actually swatted the inquiry away, like a horse tail switching flies off his flank. He does it automatically, without thought. I consider the idea that this might be a by-product of his work. Perhaps he employs this technique when he is interrogating murderers and psychopaths.
I know I do.
But I have run out of patience with him now.
We only have six hours together before I have to devise some kind of preliminary report for his bosses at the NYPD, to give them an 'insight' into his mental and emotional aptitude for return to duty. So far I don't feel I have anything like enough information. So I decide upon a more direct approach. Here goes, fingers crossed; I'm advancing with bayonets fixed on Robert Goren. Wish me luck.
- What are you passionate about, Detective?
He looks at me for a moment before standing up and wandering around my office, apparently aimlessly, like a butterfly weaving home after a late-night drinking session. He alights on my desk. I suppress a surge of irritability.
- What, you mean like ... cars? Women? Regional Chinese cuisine? Vintage comic books?
- No. Deeper than that. Real passions, not just interests.
Goren snorts lightly, and raises an eyebrow. I've shown him my hand, and he now realises I am playing on a different level.
He calls my bluff. He picks up a framed picture of my children and kind of ... waves it at me. Normally, I realise, people treat family photographs with the sort of reverence that they feel such a personal item deserves, but there is no sign of such respect in the way Goren flicks the picture around, making it an extension of his own perpetual motion. He's not even looking at it, particularly.
He's testing me, I realise.
- These your kids?
- Yes, I reply evenly, after a beat.
- Nice looking. Private school? Their ties ... it looks like Xavier High. Is it?
He knows it is. I say nothing, hopefully making it clear that I consider this particular branch line of the conversation closed. He is unperturbed by my silence, but casts around, looking for something. He's foraging for distraction on the meadow of my desk and bookcases.
While he looks at objects, I consider him. His hair has been recently cut, quite short. Almost military short. There is a thin band of pale skin running the length of his hairline around the back of his neck. The skin below the pale line is noticeably darker. Does he spend a lot of time outdoors, his gaze cast down? Unsurprising for a man of his stature, I suppose. He's bearded, which I had thought was against police regulations. It is trimmed neatly, though.
Goren's clothes present a curious mixture of messages. His shirt is open-necked, revealing a modest black undershirt. It isn't especially cold today. Maybe it's another nod to the time he spends out of doors. His shirt is starched, though. I could smell it as soon as he walked in the room, along with the faintest tang of cigarettes.
His jacket looks like part of a suit - quite an expensive one at that - which has seen better days. The center of its three buttons is loose, the fabric around it ever so slightly shiny with wear. As though he buttons up and unbuttons his jacket repeatedly, like a man does, for comfort's sake, when he sits down. I think for a moment: No, his jacket was already undone when he came in this morning. Maybe he has gained weight recently?
Did he walk here? His shoes are not remarkable. They look comfortable, familiar, utilitarian. And, enormous. They show signs of having been regularly polished.
He reaches for an ornament and I notice that his expensive dress shirt, worn so casually, requires cuff-links. I always associate cuff-links in this day and age with old-fashioned dandy-ism. Men wear them to send messages to each other. I don't recognise the insignia on these, though.
Goren is not wearing the pants that go with the suit jacket for some reason, but a pair of what I think are Levis 501s. They are not faded, or especially worn (except slightly at the knees - does he kneel down a lot?) but even so they just don't seem to fit with the other clothes he is wearing.
It's as if he is not quite sure what image it is he wants to present to the world. Well-groomed professional? Casual man-about-town at the weekend?
Perhaps his clothes reflect how he is currently caught in between two worlds. A respectable, well employed man, a police detective, but living through the artificial vacation of being on suspension. It's Thursday morning, 10.00am. He should be at work right now.
- I don't see any pictures of your husband anywhere, he says suddenly. - You divorced?
- Widowed, actually.
- Ah.
At least he doesn't offer me the standard "I'm sorry for your loss," so beloved of police officers everywhere.
- You were widowed ... recently. But it's too soon. For pictures, I mean. I get that. My partner's a widow, too. Actually.
Interesting. I try and drag him back on track.
- And do you feel passionate about that?
- Well. I expect she does.
Damn. Damn. He's good at this. I feel closed down, blocked out again. He knows it, too. He returns his attention to my desk. A paperweight of Venetian glass catches his eye and he holds it up to the light, squinting at it like a jeweller examining a particularly fine piece.
- Italian? he asks.
- Muran'ese.
- It's beautiful.
He plays with it, turning it around carefully in the light, showing much more interest and respect than he did for the photograph of the boys. He even pulls out an immaculate pocket handkerchief (and I cannot remember the last man I met who had one of those) and breathes on the paperweight before polishing it.
The glass glints in the bright mid-morning sunshine and I am simultaneously struck by a flash of my own. Inspiration. I know what it is I have to do now, if I want a piece of him. I have to offer him a piece of myself, first. I clear my throat to catch his attention.
- My husband died of an aneurysm. He was on business in Venezia-Lido. The paperweight was in with his effects. I think he had bought it as a gift for me.
Goren's expression seems to confirm my theory. I'm in. He's looking at me intently.
- Really?
I'm certain I have his interest now.
- Yes. You know, detective, I think I may have just answered my own question. Of what you're passionate about.
He comes and sits down, quite gracefully for a man his size, and looks at me. His expression would be easy to read as indolent, lazy. His eyelids have slipped halfway down the orbits of his eyes. I can understand his having been labelled as insolent, an upstart.
But I think I can read that expression another way. He looks turned on. Expectant, but trying to disguise his arousal.
- And what might that be .... ? (He uses my first name. This, coupled with the charm of his smile and the judicious use of his gaze for emphasis demonstrates for me a man who is accustomed to using - especially on women - what God has given him.)
- I think you are passionate about being curious, Detective Goren. Nosey, even. You're passionate about your 'quest'. To acquire knowledge. About people. To know things.
His expression changes to one of grudging admiration, even though this wasn't exactly a deduction of epic proportions on my part.
- Knowledge is the basis of everything I do, he admits.
- Do? As a police officer? Or as a man?
- The two are not mutually exclusive.
Oh, I get it. He's playing with me. I feel suddenly uneasy, out of my normal comfort zone. But also excited.
- So, how would you define your own passions, Detective?
- I thought it was your job to define them for me, Doctor.
I find myself resisting the notion that I am the client and he is the therapist.
- No. You think wrong, I'm afraid. It's my job to listen, and to make sure I understand what you're saying to me. But in order for me to do that work, I need you to talk to me. Really talk to me.
- What, so you can retire to a little room and write some kind of report on me? On my ... my 'fitness for purpose'?
I'm looking right at his face but even so, I almost miss it. For just an instant I see a petulant, sulky little boy looking back at me, a foreshadowing, an echo of the man he is now. It's exactly what I need.
- How do you feel about that idea?
I'm hoping to find out if he has felt judged in the past. By his parents, his father especially. This can often lead to a problem with authority in later life. But as it is, he doesn't answer that question. Not until much later on. Instead he changes the subject back to where it was originally. Clever, that.
- I guess you're right. I'm passionate about finding out what people do, and how.
- And 'why'?
- Oh, no. The 'why' is the simplest part.
- Can you do that for yourself, too?
- What?
- Figure out the 'why'?
There is a pause on the tape whilst he thinks about this. We're fifteen stories above street level here, but even so I can hear New York's endless looping soundtrack seeping up from below. I try and help him with his answer.
- I mean how is it you have such a keen understanding of the criminal mind? Do you understand your own as well?
- Experience, I guess. I've been doing this job a long time.
His eyes wander off on their own and browse, unmolested, in my bookcase. In fact, the skin underneath his eyes is dark, as though smudged with charcoal, and the lower lids are slightly red. Like someone who is not sleeping too well. Not too well at all. But there is nothing else in his voice or his attitude that betokens fatigue. Quite the contrary.
- You're passionate about your job, then.
- Most of it, yes.
I change tack again.
- Tell me about the first murder victim you encountered.
- I was eight.
- Eight?
- Yeah. It was a corpse. Washed up on the beach at Rockaway. I found it, and I went and fetched Frank. I hate the beach, you know? Frank - he's - Frank's my older brother. This guy - this dead guy - he'd lost an eye ... well, most of one side of his skull, actually. Frank dared me to touch his other eyeball.
Goren pauses, his eyes unfocused, lost for a moment in a forty-year old horror movie playing inside his mind.
- Did you do it? Did you touch the corpse?
- God, no!
- Who was it? The corpse - did you ever find out?
- Oh, he was some big-shot New York realtor. Wealthy guy. I saw a report in the papers about a week later when I was in the library with my mom. He'd been missing for quite a while. His wife ... she said he'd been on a fishing trip and hadn't ever come back. Single gunshot wound to the head.
He's lying through his teeth, and with no sign of affect. I know Goren is lying now, because the story he is telling me is, in fact, the story of my own husband. Or, Goren's version of it.
Ben was a wealthy real estate dealer, and he actually died on a weekend fishing trip off the coast of Florida. They found the boat he'd been on, but his body was never recovered. His case is cold, but I know the local PD still consider him a possible victim of homicide.
The paperweight Goren had been looking at has actually been in my mother's family for a couple of generations. Now Goren is telling me he knows who my husband was, and that my story about his death was a fake. I can say nothing, because that will prove I was lying to him earlier. But I in turn now feel pretty certain he is lying about the corpse he and his brother found, too. There never was one.
I want to smile. I want to show him it is OK for us both to take a moment to indulge in some mutual congratulations, celebrating our respective evasive brilliance.
- Tell me more about what it is fuels your passion.
- Nothing more to tell. My work defines my passions. I need to be back at work.
- 'Need'?
- Yes, I'd say so.
- Why do you think you are here?
- I'm here because .. because my 'passion' is acutely embarrassing to my superiors. And a lot of my peers, too. I make them look ineffectual.
Goren takes another breath as though to carry on, but stops abruptly. He retreats back over the bridge of our gaze.
- Anything you say here is confidential, I remind him gently.
- But your report on my fitness for duty won't be confidential, will it Doctor? It'll get passed around like a two dollar stripper on a stag night.
I raise my eyebrows in surprise.
He stands up, points at me accusingly. The atmosphere in the room has changed in a matter of moments. He points at my props, my notebook and pen.
- Go on! Write it down! Write - "Paranoid"!
Aha. At last. Passion