It was the basic insecurity evidenced by the latter sentence above that was to be her downfall. Lacking even the basic faith in her own personal sensory network to provide her with correct information, she was naturally prey for even the most amateur of manipulators and practitioners of deceit.
Of whom do we speak in such dry, academic tones? Why our darling Mabel Celeste, of course. The quote is a reflection of hers from the time during which Seth and Mary didn't break up. Or did, depending on the account you believe. You see, this is the heart of the matter: two different constructions (if we are being cynical) or perceptions (if we are being kind) of reality, both presented as if they were the Truth. Furthermore, both recounted with the same cadence, verbiage, and accusatory tones. Only the names have been changed to implicate the guilty. When one is chosen, as MC happened to be, to be the confidant and secret repository of both parties, the potential for cognitive dissonance and mental floundering is staggering.
"It was," MC remarked one afternoon "as though they had gotten together and rehearsed it with a script. Mary would stop me on the way to the laundry room with a tale of how Seth had perpetrated some outrage on her psyche or person. That evening, Seth would come over and impart the exact same story, only Mary would be the culprit." She pauses, sips her coffee. "The worst of it was the sympathy I felt for them both, separately and together." She sighs. "I've been on both ends - the longer and the longed after. I've been the one who constructs tissue castles out of sky, who takes friendly looks and weaves them into 'eyes meeting across a crowded room'; Mary and I are enough alike for me to sympathize with the glamour she has drawn across her eyes from insecurity and desire. Far less often, I've been the one who settled, allowing worship from one to act as a temporary solace for the indifference of another; I've felt the bonds of misperception slowly settle across my shoulders, around my wrists and ankles. Like Seth, it was the time I didn't sit down with my pursuer and explain gently in the moonlit darkness that I just wasn't interested at the moment; the time I gave in to my hormones for the proverbial 'sympathy fuck' - that was the time I got in trouble, and both of us got hurt."
Her eyes are shuttered at the moment; she is remembering an amalgam of frustrated desires. I am about to change the subject when she raises her head and, eyes glittering and narrowed, utters the quote above: "The construction of reality is a delicate matter. How much should one take from this person's account, how much from that? One's own information is of course always suspect, and so must be cross checked with other data sets."
And I realize that this is why they come to her: Seth, Mary, and all the other broken things of which she had become in charge. This is her talent, to make it all seem real - to feed their fantasies of who they are without even exacting the payment of sex. Because she does not see herself as real, she is a chameleon to their changing world-views. Because she is a supremely talented pattern-matcher, she can make sense out of contradictions that would stop others in their tracks, waking them (perhaps) to the real world. And because she wants so much to be loved, she is willing to accept the hand of manipulation as the hand of friendship, the hand of love. She is the ultimate worshiper, without a god. She has the power of belief, but nothing to believe in. Someday that flame will find a focus, and I pray it is reciprocal, or it is certain she will perish in the backdraft of the conflagration.