toward me then receding as she circled before the elevator. It was all I could do to keep myself still. I wanted to throw my arms about her, comfort her, provide her with shelter. My avatar, doing battle for me. And who could help her? That damned therapist! That Dora Schussler, analyst or psychologist or therapist—whatever she wished to call herself—and again I wondered, Was she up to the noble task of guiding my dear patient?
Or would there be a task at all? The seven days seemed twenty. I could do nothing but worry about the patient’s return—I feared once more that she might break off the therapy, abandoning me to my loneliness in that terrible cottage by the sea. As the days went by, I kept hearing the hot anger in the patient’s breath, which somehow mingled in my mind with the shushing of steam from the office radiators, the hiss of tires on the wet pavement below, the whisper of rain at the windows, the rush of Dr. Schussler’s machine—all around me the sounds of the patient’s broken heart.
Wednesday came at last. The doctor smoked. The sound machine went silent. Again came the slish of stockings, the exhalations of smoke, the window raised and lowered as if a semaphore telling the patient: Come. Come now. Once more the church bell played the carillon. Then the strokes of the hours: each seeming to say, no, no, no.
The minutes passed: one, two, five, fifteen. Would she never come?
Then: ding, elevator door, thud of steps, rattle of the door handle, and—slam!—the sound I had so resented but six weeks ago (could it be only that recently?), now so thrilling.
She burbled on about work—but no matter. She was here. Stochastic models and secular trends, Bayesian logic and probabilities, time horizons and intermediate “tops”—fine, anything she wished to discuss, I don’t need to understand (I sternly told myself), only let me hear the sound of her voice. As the talk of work went on, the doctor tried all her therapist’s tricks to return to the land of “last time”—as we were saying; we really should discuss; do you want to talk about?—yapping all about her client like a sheepdog. Finally she herded her charge into the desired fold, there to find the patient’s resistance as fierce as ever.
What’s there to talk about? Father hates Catholics! So he will always hate me. I’m marked—marked indelibly as something he cannot love.
Let us try to look at this another way, said the doctor. Perhaps he’ll love you all the more for “rescuing” you.
Huh! the patient replied. Absurd. How many times do I have to tell you the story about the “papist cultists,” or my friend Mary?
But—
But nothing. I’m certain about this. I might as well have a tattoo of the pope on my forehead!
The conversation went on in this vein, but the therapist could not budge the patient from her syllogism: Father hates Catholics; I’m branded as Catholic; therefore Father hates me. She replayed it throughout the hour, “stuck in a single organization of events,” as several of my own mental health professionals had put it when confronted with my own stubbornness. Seeing it from the other side (from behind the wall, as an observer), I understood the obsessive quality of such an attachment, something comforting in holding on to a smug, all-seeing knowledge, even a sad or hurtful one; something that let the patient control the precise amount of pain she administered to herself—playing her own executioner, as it were.
So the session wore itself away, as did the next, which began with the repeated trope, the therapist attempting to challenge it, the patient resisting, and so on, until the therapist gave in. She let the patient turn to other subjects, in this case her girlfriend, Charlotte, their arguments, the complicated social alignments among their friends. And another hour was gone.
The following week reprised the pattern: the broken-record recitation of her father’s hatred for her, then a jump to more quotidian matters.
Finally nudged away from this recital at one session, the patient turned to economics. The great difficulties our country was facing. Rising prices at the same time as stagnating business activity. A combination so new it required the creation of a new word: stagflation. She wondered how she could adapt her models to this “anomalous macro situation” (if I am transcribing all this correctly). She worried about the new Japanese imports—the word “econobox” had just entered the lexicon with the arrival of the first Datsuns;