to me. I longed for him to walk over to me, embrace me, at least pat me on the shoulder, and say, Don’t worry, you’re your own man, you never know.
But of course we were just boys, twelve years old, and so what, really, could he do or say? Paul quietly retrieved the clippings, put them in the box, and slid it back under the bed.
Let’s play our game, said Paul.
I don’t feel like it.
He reached for me. Sure you do, he said.
14.
I came back to myself. I heard truck engines idling in the street below, horns honking, a squeal of brakes, the airy breath of Dr. Schussler’s sound machine. I looked down at my watch: ten past eleven. I had not heard the church carillon chime the hour; the sound machine still whirred; the patient was not there. I looked across the street at the hotel: The man was gone. The window opposite was shut, the curtains drawn, no glow showing from within. From the roofline, the statue looked back at me: the naked man, the cloth about his loins.
I waited all through the day; the patient did not come. Then through the night. I returned the next day and waited, and then the next. And still the patient did not come.
All the while, I thought of her, and of the analyst who had enticed her into exploring the actual situation of her birth. And suddenly I thought the patient should flee, quit this therapy, return to the calming shadow of her mysterious origins. There she could imagine her parents to be anyone—brilliant mathematicians; fierce-minded analysts; dark-souled bisexuals, perhaps, who had passed on to her a woman’s love for women—ancestors who would understand implicitly the person she felt herself to be.
She should be more like Paul, I thought, reveling in the unknown possibilities of her future. Everyone has his own genetic fate written inside him—his own complement of mental predispositions, weaker organs waiting to fail, more or less likely routes upon which he will encounter death. But what good does it do to know it? Knowledge is not a relief. The burden is not lessened by the sense of its not being one’s own fault, not a failure of will, of intent, of virtue. One is just as subject to this fate, the fate of this body, its Furies.
15.
The week was gone. The rain went on, intermittently now; the black-hooded man daily haunted the beach; the sound machine never ceased its empty breathing. I sat in the office in the dark of the raining days and nights, and did not look out the window, afraid that I might see again the apparition of the naked man, since apparition I believed him to have been, a conjuring out of the absurd black stew of my mind.
Another week, and I began to believe that I had conjured up Dr. Schussler as well, that the hiss that came from the adjoining office was merely a sound produced by my own ears; that I had even conjured up the patient, that there had never been an adopted lesbian woman struggling to understand herself on the other side of our common wall—how else could my mere wish that she flee make her disappear?
Only some compulsion brought me back, day by day, to sit at that desk in the office. For this, at least, I thanked my blood, all the ancestors who could not see a carpet without arranging the fringe, a sofa without aligning the cushions, a shoulder without picking lint. I watched the rain, avoided looking toward the windows of the Palace, pretended to work on my lectures, whose words now seemed worthless to my eyes. How much time had passed? I didn’t care. I merely sat. What day was it? I had no idea.
When suddenly, one mid-morning, the sound machine stopped.
I did not trust the silence. Had I dreamed it?
But there was Dr. Schussler’s German-accented voice clearly saying, Welcome back! How was the trip?
And then came the young, deep, watchful voice—so rich! so lovely!—for which my whole being had been yearning.
16.
I don’t know how to begin, the patient said.
Perhaps, said Dr. Schussler, you might tell me about the trip—
The convention. Great. Granger spoke, the god of econometrics. A speech about time series data, stationary and nonstationary series—oh, it’s too complicated to explain. But it made me wish I’d studied with him at U.C. San Diego instead of going to Wharton.
The patient paused.
And from there we went to our prospective client. The Brighton