diving (the patient had or had not done this before?). Then she circled back to “the assignment” and “the old project.” Dr. Schussler of course would know the meaning of these references, or would have to pretend she did, since that was a therapist’s most basic function: to keep the thread of her patients’ stories, to remember all the names, relationships, and events, to absorb (somehow) the infinitely expanding expository action of an ongoing life. But it all meant nothing to me. I was like a person who had happened upon a novel fallen open at random.
So it was that I simply sat and listened to the sound of their voices—Dr. Schussler’s, in particular, her spat-out Ts and whistled Ss. Of course! She was German. This explained the mysterious dentalizations and sibilance that had intruded over the whir of the noise machine. But now I could also hear what the machine had masked: a calm—even soothing—resonance, something throaty in it, a tone pleasantly raked by time. Her accent confused me. I had spent a sabbatical year in Germany, living in the home of a professor of linguistics, and I had come to understand that a hard S, like the doctor’s, was characteristic of a resident of Hamburg. Yet her unhurried syllables and soft tone were more indicative of Bavaria or, perhaps, Switzerland. I wondered if she had been born in the Baltic region and had moved to the south, or perhaps vice versa, for my knowledge of German was insufficient to discern which part of her accent was dominant, so to speak.
Her patient, however, was altogether American, with the flat accent of the Midwest—from somewhere along the rim of the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Detroit. Her cadence and inflection were like those of my female former graduate students, and I therefore took her to be in her mid- or late twenties. At some point in her young life, she seemed to have unlearned the worst aspects of her native region’s speech, for she had softened the jaw-breaking growl that passed for an R in that part of the world, and had widened the mashed, dipthonged A (a horrid sound, as if you pinched your nose while saying ee-yeah) into an airy, open, monosyllabic ah. The effect, altogether, was of a provincial who had acquired culture, at an out-of-town university perhaps. Now and then, her acculturated layer slipped—an A going nasal, an R growing teeth—which was not at all an unpleasing phenomenon, as it let one hear past her creamy alto into a core of watchfulness and vulnerability.
I merely let the sound of these voices play over me, as I have said, allowing the mentioned names and places to come and go without attempts on my part to understand their referents. The patient meandered; Dr. Schussler replied occasionally with friendly nonchalance; and in this way more than half the session passed. Then came a moment I distinctly understood. The doctor’s voice abruptly changed; her accent turned harsh; her tone pointed, as she said:
So, have you thought further about our discussion before the break?
A long pause followed. And as I waited to hear the reply, I realized I had distinguished this moment because of all the therapists and analysts who had insisted upon asking me this same demonic question. And I recalled how much I had detested it: this constant looping backward in time to the last therapized hour, as if everything that had happened in the intervening days or week was not real, or not quite as real as the life lived inside yellow-lamp-lit rooms where ivy trembled at the windows. My goodwill toward Dr. Schussler retreated. I found myself allied with the young analysand, with her resistance: What force there was in the annoyed sigh she gave off! And what a long moment she took to lean over and slowly withdraw a tissue from the inevitably close-by box.
I know we agreed we’d go back to it after the break, the patient finally said. But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ve avoided it all my life for good reason. I don’t see how it will help for me to get into it now.
Dr. Schussler made a small, throaty sound but said nothing. There was now another pause, as analyst and analysand sparred to see who could longer endure the silence. Of course it was the client who gave way:
I really don’t see the relevance of that to who I am now, she said. I don’t want to go there.