Odelia's Case Fiction Concludes

Now, the conclusion to Odelia’s case fiction. The first two parts were published on the past two Fridays.

Three months into treatment, one day the name Titus popped out of Odelia’s mouth. As soon as he heard it Percival’s mind began flashing yellow warning lights. The savvy coach had long suspected that he could intuit a significant relationship merely be hearing a client pronounce a name. When he heard the name Titus, he imagined that she was in danger. 

Odelia saw Percival’s expression and noted that Titus was merely a friend. He was not her type, but she enjoyed talking about opera with him. She was somewhat taken aback by Percival’s anxiety, but she considered this friendship a sign of moral progress.

Odelia and Titus had literally bumped into each other during the intermission of Otello. Both were thrilled with the singing but were somewhat critical of the ponderous production. His opening line had been: “It’s better if you close your eyes.” 

Odelia conversed easily with this dapper rogue, who sported a bizarre Southern accent. They chatted amiably and then returned to their seats. Odelia was pleased with herself for having had a brief conversation and for not being tempted to take it much further. She did not bother to mention it to Percival.’

Two weeks later Odelia was attending a benefit dinner for patrons of the Met, when, suddenly, Titus eased himself into the empty chair beside her. Mildly shocked by his presence, she expressed a bittersweet surprise when she recognized who it was. Titus began expounding about his love of opera and Odelia was impressed by his fine sensibility. The more she listened the more she was intrigued by this emigre Texan.

In a world of go-getters Titus was a man of leisure. Heir to an oil fortune he disposed of seemingly unlimited resources and had dedicated himself to enjoying life. Awash in friends whom he wined and dined with typically Texas bravado, he had seduced and abandoned a myriad of young beauties. He knew how to please women and Odelia was quickly mesmerized by his charm.

Eventually, Titus invited her to a pre-Rigoletto dinner and she quickly accepted. Of course, his remarks oozed superficiality but Odelia was too charmed to notice. The more he kept a sage distance from her the more she wanted him to touch her. He never expressed any romantic interest, but she felt increasingly disarmed. His presence seemed to transform her into a school girl, and she began dreaming of herself ensconced in a garden of delights with her ever-attentive Titus. She was enraptured. She was too embarrassed to explain it all to Percival. 

Odelia was not unconscious of the danger she was facing. She decided to work it out at successive LA meetings. There a fellow addict warned her sternly: “If this man asks you to walk naked across the stage of the Met, you will do it without thinking.” Her sponsor Gwynn understood well the power of temptation, and saw Odelia turning into a glob of jelly. Gwynn felt obliged to warn Odelia about this clear and present danger, and reminded her that falling in love would be like falling off a cliff.

For his part Percival found the prohibitions excessive, but he knew that few women could consign themselves to a life without love. He feared that he had released her from the tyranny of her father’s dictates to offer her up as a sacrifice to some lothario. 

So Percival proposed an exercise. “Let us imagine,” he said, that you become romantically involved with titus. What are the possible outcomes? Will you run off to Tahiti to collect fallen coconuts or will you continue your work with your father’s company?Unfortunately, his past history suggests that after he scores a conquest he disappears into the long good night.”

He should have kept these thoughts to himself. As she listened to him, Odelia was becoming increasingly enraged. She blurted out: “You are trying to control me. You want to normalize me, to teach me to settle for domestic servitude. I know what I feel and I am not going to deny my feelings. I am going to do what I want as I want, and if you don’t like it, I will happily go elsewhere.”

Percival apologized and decided to let it all work itself out. There is no harm in being cautious, especially for someone who is ready to throw caution to the proverbial winds. 

By good fortune, he soon had a powerful ally, Odelia’s mother. This woman was delighted to have been developing a relationship with her daughter. The women had been having lunch and going shopping, on various occasions. 

Still, Odelia’s mother understood that expressions of disapproval might well cause her daughter to become incautious. So she devised a plan. She would provide her daughter with another eligible suitor. So she arranged a chance encounter between her daughter and her friend Hermione’s son, Clarence.

One day when Odelia was negotiating the cost of replacing copper pipes in a building on John Street, her cell phone rang. When she answered she heard her mother’s voice in something of a panic. She was supposed to throw a cocktail party that evening to raise money for Meals on Wheels. But, she was feeling unwell. Could Odelia come over to set up the party and perhaps act as co-hostess. 

As a rule Odelia never attended such functions. She found her parents’ friends tedious and was too busy to indulge such frivolity. But she could hardly refuse an urgent request from a mother who had recently become a good friend.

So, Hermione also invited her son to come to the party. Perhaps the two young people would meet by chance. It was hard to imagine a more transparent ploy, but times were difficult and their children were not to be trusted to their own devices.

So, the party was proceeding apace when Hermione marched through the door with her nondescript son, Clarence, the cotton exchange lawyer.

Odelia felt a wave of genuine disinterest wash through her spirit. Clearly, he was not her type. He seemed more drawn to charts and graphs than to human beings. Odelia decided that she could at least be polite.

Clarence felt otherwise. Within minutes of being introduced to Odelia, Clarence was smitten. His eyes were aglow with longing, almost as though he had never seen a woman before. This started making Odelia uncomfortable. Being courteous to her mother’s friend’s son was going to require no small expenditure of effort. On a couple of occasions she tried to extricate herself from his boring conversation, only to find that he was following her around like a drooling puppy dog. When, at the end of the evening,  Clarence asked for her phone number, she felt obliged to hand it over.

Percival listened attentively to this story, and was thinking that Clarence would, at the least, quickly lose interest and dump her. And he considered that the young man obviously had very little experience with women, something that he did not consider a flaw.

Odelia was not impressed. She came back at him, explaining that she had recently had her first kiss with Titus, and that the feeling was close to divine.

Four months of consultations had yielded a crisis. Percival was almost out of ideas. So, he tried something else. He pointed out that the man who played a woman’s feelings with the greatest skill, who drives her to the height of ecstasy, who makes her feel thoroughly desired, is likely a Don Juan, someone who cares very little for her. Odelia was being set up for a fall, and not merely for falling in love.

The problem is going to be, he continued, that Titus is a social parasite. He does nothing. He has accomplished nothing of consequence. When Odelia introduces him to the men she associated with in her business, they will see it immediately and treat him with haughty disdain. And that is before he starts feeling threatened by his wife’s accomplishments. 

Odelia was having none of it. She was tired of the Puritanism of the LA movement and was not going to ignore the murmurings in her loins because someone had told her that it might be dangerous.

So, Percival was almost out of arguments. He saw that he was not going to dissuade his client, so he asked her to give poor hapless Clarence a chance also. No harm would be done by having a dinner date with him, 

Percival believed in balance, especially in emotional balance. He dreaded the possibility that Odelia would find herself facing a choice between Titus and nothing. And he was thinking that Titus would most assuredly disappoint, while Clarence might surprise her.

Then Odelia accepted an invitation to have dinner with Titus, at his apartment, with him cooking. The course of the evening was clear and Odelia accepted willingly. There’s only so much deprivation a girl can  tolerate.

Percival was frankly anxious. A man like Titus would have been avid before his ultimate conquest, only to become withdrawn and sullen in the aftermath. 

As expected Odelia arrived at her next consultation aglow. Her enthusiasm for her romantic evening with Titus was, to put it mildly, excessive. Everything was magical. They had fallen into each other’s arms, torn each other’s clothes off and had made love twice before they started on dinner. She felt that they were enacting the opera about Tristan and Isolde.

It sounded very good, but the ever cynical Percival remarked that Tristan and Isolde did not have a happy ending. To which Odelia took offense, reasonably.

When Odelia returned home her telephone rang. It was the hapless Clarence, calling to confirm their date for the evening. This made Odelia recall that she had actually agreed to this new way to waste time. And yet, unlike many members of her generation, she had a rank aversion to last minute cancellations, so she caught a quick nap, and sang her way through a shower imagining that Titus was there with her.

And yet, she half expected that she would be meeting Titus at the Ocean Grill and was more than slightly disappointed to see Clarence. She did not know what to say, but she recalled Percival’s advice, to the effect that the man had succeeded at his work and therefore must have something interesting to say.

By the time they had emptied their first bottle of Montrachet, Odelia found herself engaged in an animated conversation about their mothers. Not the most prepossessing subject, but Clarence was showing a liveliness, a sardonic sense of humor that she would never have expected. She found herself laughing at his jokes and was pleased with herself for having turned the evening into something that was anything but boring.

In the meantime Odelia was becoming more and more distracted at work. Her father noticed and was not especially happy about it. He found his dream crashing around him. Perhaps his daughter would find something other than real estate to occupy her mind.

So, he concocted another, not entirely unreasonable plan. He could take his company public, sell enough of his own shares to finance a foundation and install Odelia as its chief executive. Somehow or other he saw that real estate was not entirely his daughter’s strong suit.

In the meantime the relationship with Titus was undergoing wild gyrations. Unsurprisingly. The couple was experiencing occasional moments of ecstatic bliss, balanced by times when titus was simply unavailable. Titus was a dream lover, but, otherwise, he was notably inconstant. For a man whose time was entirely his own, he was often busy and preoccupied. Sometimes he would flood her with amorous emails and flowers. At other times he would forget to contact her for days on end. They found wonderful activities to share, but increasingly they had less and less to say to each other. Titus was disengaged with life in the big city, and this was not to Odelia’s liking.

In the meantime Odelia had met Titus’s sister and brother-in-law, visiting New York on a shopping expedition. While she liked them well enough she felt mildly alienated from them. In brief, they were not her kind of people. Worse yet, they were wanting to have their brother relocate to Texas, a prospect that sent chills up Odelia’ spine.

The ever-zealous Clarence was never in the game. Odelia went on several dates with him, and she noticed that he was more comfortable with her. He was more self-confident, almost charming, more garrulous and even amusing. But then, when he found out about Titus, his ardor dampened considerably. He decided to fold his hand and to withdraw from the fray. 

How well did Odelia survive her inevitable break up from Titus? Better than might be expected. If it counts for anything, her emotional turmoil did not produce another nervous breakdown. And, strangely enough, having her mother’s support sustained her in this time of trouble.

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