be.
76.
I looked down at my watch and was shocked to see that the session had gone well overtime. I had been so engrossed in the story that I had lost track of the hour; perhaps this had happened to Dr. Schussler as well, I thought. But then in a soft voice she said:
We have gone overtime tonight because I thought it best not to interrupt you. Sometimes a session is that critical, and I wanted to let you continue as long as possible. But I am afraid we must stop now.
I understand, said the patient. And thank you.
But before you go, let me ask: Did you believe what your mother told you?
About?
About your looking like her sister.
Well … Yes … I did. And I have since. But now I suppose …
She stopped speaking, and there was hardly a sigh or a crinkle of leather issuing from the neighboring office. This went on for a good half minute, an eternity in a conversation, until the patient said at last:
I guess it all fit so well with my fantasy. When big-M Mother first told me the whole story, she kept asking me if I really wanted to know the truth. Remember? And I had a moment where I wanted to cling on to one last fantasy. The rich woman in her house in Berlin who held salons. A grand house full of the intelligentsia of prewar Europe. And here was my actual birth mother fitting right into that dream. But something in me knew it was all too good to be true. A mother so beautiful, still young-looking but for that problem with her back or her hip—oh, that just makes the story better: a war wound of some kind, from a bombing, maybe. Then add artists of Weimar. And then the beautiful lesbian sister. And I look like her!
She paused. I really did want to believe her. But now that you ask …
She was quiet for perhaps twenty seconds, then said:
Why are you asking?
It only seems odd, said Dr. Schussler, that she would not have told you right from the beginning. Why not, when you walked in, say, My God! The image of my beloved sister! Or when she told you Gisella was a lesbian—why not then?
The patient hummed. Maybe I sensed that. Maybe I did. So you think … You think she’s not saying …
She could be telling you some things she believes you would like to hear, said Dr. Schussler. Also perhaps what she would prefer to remember.
I don’t understand. Is there something else you think was, well, a lie?
Weimar was not … Germany was … It was a very difficult time.
77.
And that is how the therapist left her patient! On that note of doubt! The one solace the patient had gained during the visit—the knowledge that she looked like a daring lesbian with her gorgeous girls—obliterated by Dr. Schussler. What kind of doctor sends one out the door saying, Perhaps you have cancer. Perhaps not. Come back in a few days. Yet this is exactly the condition in which my poor patient was turned out into the street past ten o’clock on a Monday night, when Market Street was returning to its seedy core.
Dr. Schussler finally gathered her things and left about fifteen minutes later, after which I found myself curiously agitated. I waited for the N Judah. The air was cool, the wind down, the fog having completed its invasion and now blanketing the night. The city lights played against the thick, low clouds—here blue, there reddish, there the dun color of hopelessness—so that I seemed to stand not under a natural sky but encased in a metallic dome. The streetcar rumbled toward me out of the fog; it screeched to a stop; the doors yawned open. Yet I remained rooted to the platform, unable to induce myself to climb aboard. After some interval, during which time the car gently rocked on its tracks, the driver did not look at me, and the three people in the car did not speak, the tram shut its doors and rattled off into the night.
Without intention, I found myself wandering “outbound” on Market Street (or such is the direction as calibrated by the good San Franciscans, who seem not to travel east or west, north or south, but into the city center and out of it). Beyond the wide boulevard of Van Ness came the no-man’s-land of vacant lots and abandoned buildings. And an unbidden thought came to me: The