Texas Tango: A Flint Rock Novel Read Free Page A

that hit me.”
     
    They continued comparing notes.   Ava had not fared as well as Flint.   She had a hurt elbow and a sore left knee.   She did not yet have a rental car, so a few minutes after 9:00 Flint was outside of 200 Congress Avenue, a new condo building called the Austonian, which at fifty-six floors advertised itself as the tallest residential building in Texas.  
     
    Ava had arranged for Flint to park in her building's garage.   She was waiting in the lobby of the gleaming new glass and steel high rise when Flint walked in.   She extended her hand.   “I have tea ready to make upstairs, but I want to look in on my office across the street before taking you up.   I have a studio space in 100 Congress where I see patients,” she said looking across Willie Nelson Boulevard which separated her residential and office buildings.   She led Flint across what had been called Second Street before it was renamed for the famous country singer.   They were soon in a rose colored, polished granite, twenty-two story building.  
     
    Ava had carefully laid out the ninth floor suite where she practiced psychiatry.   One entered through a door from the hallway into a medium sized room with comfortable chairs.   Clients waited there for their appointed times.    Dominating one wall was a tall, narrow photo of the Japanese bridge over part of Monet's lily pond in Giverny, France.   On another wall showed a framed photo of Gustave Caillebotte's pre impressionistic1877 painting titled Paris Street, Rainy Day .   Flint looked more closely, saw that it was a clever photograph of the intersection of streets that Caillebotte had painted.   The top half was a contemporary black and white photo.   The bottom half was a scan of the oil painting owned by the Chicago Art Institute.   The two parts had been combined into a single image using Photoshop.   Ava's signature was in the bottom left corner of each beautifully framed art work.
     
    The artistic photography made Flint smile, and he told Ava so.   Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveler were on a coffee table and the room had Wifi.   A small refrigerator stored free bottled water.
     
    Through the only other door in the waiting room, one entered the larger main space where sessions took place.   That room was longer than wide, extending twenty-nine feet from the door to the opposite wall of darkly tinted glass overlooking the hill country.   Taking advantage of that view was a desk with a straight chair looking west from Austin.  
     
    As one entered the session room from the waiting area, Ava’s chair was backed up to the right hand long wall.   Directly across from her chair was a leather sofa.   At the right-hand end of the sofa was a chair identical to hers.   It and the chair in which Ava sat were angled to face each other directly.
     
    Flint walked over to the client's chair, sat in it.   "A person feels a great distance from you sitting here," he observed.
     
    "Yes.   The belief is that some clients will feel intimidated if I am looking straight at them up close."
     
    "Interesting," Flint rejoined.   "You would rather have the client see you as a distant authority than an intimate friend?"
     
    "At first, yes.   Transference occurs and they then don't see me as distant."
     
    To the right of Ava’s chair as Flint sat looking at it was an antique wood cabinet with a tasteful lamp.   On the other side of her chair was a long credenza.   In the center above it was a framed sketch.   At first Flint thought it was realistic but then he realized he did not know what it represented.   Hung directly across from the client’s chair, it served as a Rorschach, a kind of inkblot pattern for when the client stared away from Ava in thought.
     
    Everything about the physical setting was low key and calm, muted warm colors, rounded corners, gentle curves in the furnishings.
     
    Flint approved.   There was no receptionist.   Ava answered the