Empathy finishes last in domestic 'Deceit'
The Practice of Deceit
By Elizabeth Benedict
Houghton Mifflin, 268 pp., $23.95
Elizabeth Benedict's latest novel, ''The Practice of Deceit," turns on the pun in its title. Practicing attorney Colleen O'Brien Golden tricks Eric Lavender, practicing clinical psychologist, into marrying her. Eric's head is turned by seven factors, including ''chemistry," Colleen's ''broken heart," and the ''milky breasts that covered it." Perhaps their meeting is destiny: They live in New York but meet in a California hotel on the last day of the old millennium. Eric, depressed, is sitting a kind of solitary shiva for his newly dead father, whose ashes he carries in a grocery bag. Colleen is on a brief holiday. He accepts her invitation to lunch, and even when he discovers that she has an infant daughter, he figures she must be a Good Samaritan. They fall in love.
Neither lover is young. Eric is a confirmed 47-year-old bachelor, whose preferred patient is an artist, or a writer, or maybe an activist. He dates a series of ''young, energetic, preferably buxom" women, while carefully avoiding both deceit and marriage. Eric can cope with the fact that Colleen has a baby. His real issue is with her profession. Women attorneys, he believes, are likely to be much too ''argumentative" even if they are not ''pernicious." At least, he figures that Colleen, 41, is too old to be ''high-maintenance."
Eric does not know what he is in for, but he should. He enjoys playing weekend father to baby Zoe, but is surprised when Colleen tells him she is pregnant with his child. Although they have known each other for only two months, he puts aside his qualms and marries her. By the time their daughter, Sarah Rose, is born, they are living a routine Scarsdale life in Colleen's lovely Colonial.
Eric does not trust attorneys. But he also recognizes that practicing therapy in Scarsdale requires its own deceit. He is bored by his suburban patients, mostly restless housewives. As Colleen has predicted, these women adore Eric and take to his unique version of body-mind therapy, which features dolls, crayons, and a massage table, but no actual touching.
The marriage seems solid, and Eric and Colleen joke that they are both problem solvers. However, we know from the first page that this union cannot be saved. The action begins when Zoe is 4, Sarah Rose is 2, and Eric is in jail. Colleen has accused him of the ''forcible touching" of Zoe.
The crisis is precipitated when Eric begins treating an unhappy husband with a distant wife and a withdrawn son. Eric is grateful for this interesting case until he discovers that Colleen is representing the man's wife in their divorce.
Eric and Colleen squabble over this obvious conflict of interest. Clearly, their interests conflict in much more significant ways. Benedict invites the reader to think about the intersection of legal vs. emotional support in divorce cases. Who is the real helper here: the aggressive, opinionated female divorce lawyer, externally rational but internally possessed by vengeance, or the ultra-empathetic therapist, seeking his client's true feelings while overlooking explicit marital deceptions? Although the question is interesting, the novel is much more involved with unraveling Colleen's personal history. We are not surprised when the relationship crashes in a heap of suspicion, discovery, and deceit.
Without a doubt, Colleen is the bad guy. After all, she has manipulated Eric into fatherhood and marriage. Still, Eric is not a very appealing good guy. He is troublingly dim for a psychotherapist, justifying Colleen's behavior since ''core pain comes down to abandonment." If Colleen is cranky, she must have been abandoned by her birth family. If her defense of women is too dogmatic, her first husband must have abandoned her. Eric's empathy overpowers his perspicacity. Falsely accused and in jail, he even declares, ''We all have the capacity to feel lost, afraid, abjectly vulnerable. Even a sociopath. Even a trial lawyer."
Would another man, a non-clinician, be so forgiving? The reader is left thinking that Colleen may be a crooked lawyer, but Eric is a real dolt. Feeling sorry for either of them may be too much to ask.
Judy Budz is a professor of English at Fitchburg State College. 
