vanished, then returned—a rubbing, slip-slip—then vanished again.
I was suddenly frightened. What if I had gotten everything wrong? What if the great, dramatic turning point in the patient’s therapy was not to be a grand story but an abrupt ending? With dawning dread, I remembered: the patient’s sense that years had gone by, that nothing had changed, that nothing would ever change—how often had such feelings led me to abandon whatever therapist, psychiatrist, counselor, analyst, social worker, doctor who had dared to presume I might be happy? The patient could leave Dr. Schussler. She could abandon me.
And now again came that rubbing, cicada-like slip-slip.
Then another sound, a scrape.
My nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent of phosphorus; now of smoke. A cigarette: Dr. Schussler was smoking!
I no longer smoked—my stale-tobacco smell had become too memorable—but my nose was yet lined with countless receptors for the bitter, brilliant, desperate, dangerous scent that now came sliding under our adjoining door. I knew at once, with utter certainty, that Dr. Dora Schussler was smoking not a Kent, nor a Marlboro, nor a simpering Kool or Newport, but that she inhaled nothing other than a Pall Mall or a Viceroy—Viceroy, I decided—so tuned was I still to the tender shadings of my former addiction. I could all but see the pack, the gold medallion pendant from a V-shaped pin. And along with this sudden visualization of her cigarettes, I could picture the doctor herself: leaning back in her chair, lifting her head, exhaling, tipping the ash into the ashtray, crossing and recrossing her legs. Of course. That was the slip-sound I had been hearing: the slide of nylon upon nylon.
I was immediately becalmed. It was as if a long, long snake had curled under the door and wound one end around the therapist and the other around me—so joined did I feel to the experience of Dr. Schussler’s cigarette: every breath she took, in and out, lung to lung. I inhaled her assurance. There was no need to worry. If not today, then next time: The patient would return.
And, soon enough, there came the ding of the elevator, the footsteps running down the hall, the therapist rising to open her door, the slam as the draft banged it shut.
Oh, hell, said the patient. I’m so sorry. A ridiculous argument at work. You know how I hate being late.
7.
Sit down, said the therapist.
It was the third derivative, said the patient.
But of course. Sit down.
The patient took her seat with a great puff of a cushion.
Carl kept questioning our historical curve analysis, the patient went on. Get rid of that function on the third derivative, he says. But Marsha refuses. It’s done; it works; leave it, she says. But then Peter insists, Let’s consider Carl’s input. But Paul agrees with Marsha, and says, No, we tested it; it’s working; our model is predictive. And so everyone is arguing in my carrel, and no one hears me when I’m saying, Stop, I’ve got to go. Then even more people pile in.
The patient rambled on in this vein: Peter, Marsha, Carl, Sasha, William, Paul, John, Larry. If Dr. Schussler knew these people, she simply let their names go by, as did I, since they meant nothing at all to me. The patient spoke, besides, of secular trends and intermediate trades, of waves and quadrants and regression curves, not to mention various incomprehensible three- and four-letter acronyms, which, I presumed, pertained to her company’s insider terms relating to stock-market technical analysis and econometrics (subjects about which, again, I knew nothing).
But no matter. The sound of her voice soothed me. The curling remains of Dr. Schussler’s cigarette still threaded the air, floating by like the patient’s incomprehensible words. I simply sat still and enjoyed the tone of her voice, which played above the words like the sustain of a majestic chord. And there was something else, a little tremolo, the deep, inner unease I had noticed on that first day. For even as she raved on, it seemed that the little watchful person who stood guard over her speech had remained at his post, at attention, carefully ushering her confused As and Rs into the proper halls of culture.
She continued on for some time about her problems at work: a project that was late, a manager who disliked her, a woman in another group—was she perhaps a lesbian? Charlotte then made an appearance: another argument, this time initiated by someone’s failure to fold the sheets (whether it was the patient or