one

Dr. H. and Dr. Z. were leaving a meeting of the psychoanalytic journal held at a colleague’s house. They each had emptied a few glasses of a good Cabernet Sauvignon, and Dr. Z. had devoured the Saint André cheese, leaving only the yellow rind on the plate and a few broken crackers behind. Because they were cautious men and more aware of the consequences of even the most casual conversation than others who had not made their particular professional choices, they spoke to each other in low voices about Dr. B.

I don’t think she recognized me, said Dr. H.

Her comments were strange, said Dr. Z.

She’s still the editor-in-chief, said Dr. H.

It’s a farce, these meetings, said Dr. Z.

You want to tell her to step down? asked Dr. H.

She would never, said Dr. Z.

She was my supervisor, said Dr. H.

How was she? asked Dr. Z.

A good enough mother to my psychoanalytic self, said Dr. H.

Just that, said Dr. Z.

Just that, said Dr. H.

Can you talk to her? asked Dr. Z.

I can’t, said Dr. H.

Years ago I thought about sending my daughter to her, said Dr. Z.

Yes, said Dr. H.

Ronit wasn’t interested, said Dr. Z.

Your daughter is an oncologist, isn’t she? said Dr. H.

Yes, said Dr. Z.

Dr. Estelle Berman had a new patient. She was the daughter of a colleague, Dr. Herbert Gordon. He was a follower of a branch of psychoanalysis that had challenged some of the older Freudian concepts and gained a considerable following. Dr. Berman had congratulated him on the paper he had given at a conference in Madrid the summer before and as a result he had sent her his daughter, a movie star: a real movie star. When she opened the door Dr. Berman saw with an excited beat of her heart the beauty that had walked past her and taken the patient’s seat politely, like a good child. The movie star, two movies, one a critical and financial disaster, was wearing blue jeans with high leather boots and a shirt that showed all that it could and still remain on the body.

The movie star said, Shrinks’ kids, we’re all crazy, right?

Dr. Berman always found that sentiment irritating. She heard the hostility in the remark: if you’re so smart how come your kids are just like everyone else’s. As if immunity from life should have been accorded the children of psychoanalysts.

The remark stung. It stung because it was true, there was no good defense, even the best of physicians could not protect their own children from the predators of body and mind that lay outside their homes or dwelled inside their homes. It was true, shrinks’ kids went down the drain, just as often as the rest but their parents had begun an inquiry, one still at a primitive stage, but a start, a brilliant start, to our understanding of ourselves, our envies, our lusts, our rage, our love, our tenderness, our small sparks of happiness, our ways of hurting ourselves and others. Is an orthopedist’s child not allowed to limp? She did not say this to the girl in her office.

From a certain perspective, Dr. Berman’s perspective, no one was normal. Nothing was normal. The human brain vibrated like the universe itself with too many parts to be classified in categories of normal or not. Afflictions were everywhere and so was the glory of the thing, the bravery of loving or hating or wishing or failing. There was a lot of normal failing, that Dr. Berman did admit.

Justine, Betty on her birth certificate, took a pack of Marlboros out of her bag. She was not afraid of death, she announced. Dr. Berman hated the smell of burning tobacco and despised the spill of ashes over her carpet but she knew some patients needed it if they were to talk to her and so she said nothing. Betty, a.k.a. Justine, had the white blonde hair of a Swedish child and the black eyes of a Dostoevsky heroine and those eyes blinked at Dr. Berman nervously. I don’t do drugs, she said as if in answer to an accusation. I’ll bet, thought Dr. Berman. At least, the patient said, not so much as I used to. Are you making a movie in New York? asked Dr. Berman. She preferred a little small talk to a confrontation on drugs one minute into the first meeting.

No, said Justine. I’m here because my boyfriend is making a movie here. Dr. Berman was clearly supposed to know who the boyfriend was and what movie he was making but she didn’t. She was silent. Was being so beautiful a burden? wondered Dr. Berman. Perhaps Justine didn’t think she was lovely. Most likely only her face was lovely and her mind ugly as a nest of poisonous ants.

Justine told her story all the while crossing and uncrossing her long legs, smoothing her hair and then tangling it in the next gesture. The tale was about the boyfriend who had left her for a stripper, or almost a stripper, but didn’t want the papers to hear of it until the movie he was working on was released and so had forced her to lie to her publicist and everyone which had made her want to steal something which would get her in trouble again. Dr. Berman had missed the news about her arrest in LA over just a small misunderstanding, something she would have fixed if the police weren’t after her because they hated her. Rehab was out of the question. Justine would never go into rehab.

Altogether Justine was like a cat in a tree, hissing and showing its claws because it was stuck, up so high and with no way to get down.

Dr. Berman was not afraid of Justine. By the time the forty-five minutes were up, Dr. Berman didn’t even think Justine such a great beauty. She saw the tired drawn lines on her face and she saw the nails chewed to the tips, painted with blue glitter and all. She saw the girl’s eye makeup run down her cheeks when she admitted to an abortion this boyfriend had demanded. Dr. Berman saw a girl who probably hadn’t changed her underwear in days. Her neck wasn’t clean either.

Don’t steal anything before our next appointment, said Dr. Berman as she stood up, letting Justine know her time was up. Justine smiled and said she would try not to.

She had her fingers crossed.

Stardom, had that become the American dream? Was it the riches or the adulation that followed that made the star an object of worship and envy? Stardom eluded people who were quite able to be themselves, their usual selves. It was not the expectation of those who could feel alive without others’ eyes on their private parts. It was for fragile, hungry types, who were looking for themselves in the applause of an audience and that applause always died down.

What was it Justine said she had stolen? It was a fox fur coat because she really didn’t approve of buying one, which would support the killing of innocent animals.

Dr. Berman had a bad headache.

Narcissism, what a nasty word, with its professional ring and its cutting finality. It was the obvious word to describe Justine. But what exactly did that mean? Was Justine trapped inside a dank prison of self, a beautiful body, Dr. Berman acknowledged, even if worn at the edges? Was Justine to be envied or pitied? And if the thousands of screaming fans who had almost mobbed her when she went to a nightclub with her boyfriend who was not her boyfriend but was just acting like her boyfriend, knew how deeply Justine wanted someone to keep her in one piece, save her from punishments of her own devising, would they still scream in joy when she traipsed past them on her five-inch heels, steadying herself on the arm of the boyfriend who wished she were someone else?

A girl like this might come from an orphanage, from a series of foster homes in which neglect was not so benign. But this one came from an analyst’s home, she had gone to the Lab school in Chicago and had play dates with children whose parents wrote for The New York Review of Books. There was something southern in her accent, a Kentucky mountain echo, which she must have learned from music videos since her father had arrived here in his teens from Liverpool and her mother was a violinist from Haifa.

So Justine was a construct made of cameras and the Cloud. Could Dr. Berman turn her into a real girl? Were psychoanalysts, like Geppetto, set up for betrayal by bad little puppets? Why was Justine not real? Justine herself had no interest in the why. It was her father’s question and she didn’t like it and had no intention of seeking an answer. What she wanted from Dr. Berman was asylum: a safe room where she could hide. Dr. Berman was willing to offer that too. But she also wanted to know why.

On Central Park West, children were stepping off the yellow school buses that rode like migrating elephants down the avenue in the fading light of day. Taxis raced on both sides of the street, passengers coming and going, from their analytic appointments perhaps. Dogs and dog walkers roamed on the other side of the stone fence, along the paths’ lines of gray cement benches stretched beneath winter trees, reminders of a wilderness long banished and not mourned. Nearby a playground waited, empty, with swings on rusty chains and a sandbox with an abandoned coffee container on its rim.

Six stories above Dr. Estelle Berman watched as her last patient balanced her coat and bag on one arm and vanished out the door. She sat in the deep leather chair while her shadow lay across the Persian rug she had purchased years ago when she had been a young analyst still in training, attending classes at night, in analysis herself with one of the major figures in her institute, a man who had not expressed openly his admiration for her, his young analysand, but who had, she was quite sure, deep and essential feelings of attraction and longing for her, feelings of course he could not act on, and would not act on, because of the ethics of the profession, because of his esteemed position in the analytic community.

Her apartment had four bedrooms and a maid’s room. It had a kitchen with windows that overlooked the yards of the brownstones on the street behind. In the spring the voices of children playing rose to the sixth floor and the rhododendron and pachysandra bushes bloomed.

The apartment:

A long dining room with an oak table that sat twelve.

A living room: wide enough for three couches, two armchairs, two inlaid coffee tables from India, a cabinet of fine Spode, and two rugs from China with dragon tails marking the corners.

Windows looking out over the park.

When it snowed the gentle ridges of earth were marked in dark stripes as the tracks of sleds and skis crisscrossed the white expanse outside the window. In the evening the lamplights glowed and downtown the windows of tall buildings, banks and hotels, offices and stores, illuminated the night sky through which patrolling helicopters on terrorist alert rode uptown to the George Washington Bridge and back over the Statue of Liberty on their nightly route. Higher in the sky, across the park, the white and blue lights of incoming and outgoing planes, fireflies of the industrial world, flickered against the rising moon.

Dr. Berman’s office: off the front hall—a large desk with lion paw feet.

The desk: covered with journals and papers and notes and a phone that was never answered during sessions.

On the left a high blue and white Mandarin porcelain vase filled with fresh cut gladiolas or lilies, or in season, branches of lilacs or forsythia.

A couch on one side of the wall with an afghan blanket folded at its foot.

A beige upholstered patient chair with blue pillow.

Bookshelves:

A floor-to-ceiling bookcase stood against the wall behind the couch. It held the many volumes of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, books no one needed anymore since the articles were all online. A press of a finger and each could be recalled from the dark recesses of cyberspace where it waited for attention, hibernating through long nights of neglect.

And on the next shelf, the volumes of Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo, all in faded blue covers, the twenty-three-volume Strachey edition, the three-volume Jones biography, dust on the rims, books that stood guard over her patients, like stars in the sky, looking down on soldiers waiting in trenches, waiting for dawn to rise when they would rush with terrible fear toward the enemy. Dr. Berman was not a tall woman, just a bit over five feet, and to reach the books on the upper shelves she had to call the super who would stand on a chair and bring down the volume she wanted.

A piece of stone pottery engraved with a reproduction of a raven-headed god from the Israeli museum shop, purchased the year the international meetings were in Tel Aviv. (Afterwards she and Howard along with a small group from her institute went on to Cairo and down the Nile.) And in the far corner a biography of Joan Crawford and one of Gloria Swanson.

This was an apartment that spoke of the last century, grander times, when the great buildings along Central Park West were rising one after another filled with New York’s newest money, its most recent arrivals, its most fortunate merchants and their families.

It was a rent-controlled apartment.

Who would not be envious of such an apartment, an apartment with four bedrooms and a maid’s room. There was also a house in Southampton with a swimming pool and a tennis court. There Dr. Berman spent August, often welcoming psychoanalysts from other continents who were familiar to one another from papers given at international meetings and published in journals of note.

Dr. Berman closed her eyes. She needed to nap, like a cat, like her cat Lily.

Could she sleep now? Was it time? Should she leave her office or should she stay? Did she have another appointment? Where was her book, the black leather book with the days and the hours marked, with the telephone numbers of patients, with a red ribbon to move forward day after day as if one might wrap time like a present, like the gold watch she received for her sixtieth birthday from Howard, her husband, her second husband, the first one is not worth mentioning. Gone, both husbands. Wrong word: dead that second husband, ashes rising in an updraft as seagulls gathered on the dunes at their beach house where every summer, even when his heart was failing, even when his face was drained of color, he had arranged clambakes and picnics for her colleagues and friends. She could almost feel his hand on her shoulder, his big hand. The dancing, he was a good dancer, had stopped. She had felt safe when he was in the room. The bulk of him, the too much weight in the belly, the kindness of him kept her calm: unless it didn’t. Four or was it five times she had threatened to divorce him. He was faithful. She less so. She traveled without him. He traveled only with her. She was the voice in the whirlwind and he was the willow that bent in the storm. She was admired by a host of students and patients and often invited to introduce brilliant and original minds at annual lectures at the Academy of Medicine. He ordered the car that would pick them up after the theater. He arranged for the plumber to fix the leak in the pipes. He was her consort and she was his queen. She liked diamonds and he liked to buy them for her, which he could because he was president of a company that supplied paper products to doctors’ offices, including gowns that opened to the front or the back.

She had learned to live alone, alone with her son and the help in the house. If she did not stumble into a memory, or fall upon an empty moment, she managed well. She moved quickly, briskly, keeping the door to old longings closed as tightly as it could close. She had her private regrets. She was not immune to pain.

What had the patient who had just left talked about? What was that patient’s name? It was a woman, she was sure of that. The couch was smooth as always. The small towel on the pillow unwrinkled. The patient must have been sitting in the chair, not lying on the couch.

What had the patient who had just left brought to the session? What had she said to the patient? If she were quiet and still it would come back to her. If she didn’t let her mind race forward, but thought of serene moments, of waiting for Howard to finish his dessert, of listening to her favorite aria from La Traviata with Howard in the next room watching the ball game, then it would come to her suddenly like the smell of her own body on a hot summer day. She waited. It doesn’t matter, she said to herself. She picked up Lily and held her in her lap, stroking the gray and white fur, tapping the place between the ears that made the cat purr with contentment. The cat jumped off her lap and left long hairs on her black skirt. She brushed the hairs away and waited, hoping Lily would soon return.

She said aloud the names of places visited, beaches and hotels: was that where the international conference was held where she gave her first paper or was it the auditorium of her son’s school, was it a graduation or was it a memorial service, a memorial for whom?

Dr. Berman had not slept well. At four in the morning an ambulance siren had wailed its demented warning as it raced past her block. She had walked to the window and stared out at the eastern sky. The sun beneath the horizon was pushing its way toward her slowly, too slowly. And all through the night she had dreamed: wallpaper from old rooms she once knew well, lamps that had sat on desks in whose drawers she had once hidden a lover’s letter as well as the tax forms from the years before, a dress ripped, a glove without its mate, and always the sound of a ringing alarm clock, in the almost darkness of the city where the glow of the blue, green, red Empire State Building, its needle pointed into God’s eye, never disappeared entirely. Again she thought about her mother. Her mother had been dead some fifty years and no longer had any skin on her bones, which Dr. Berman knew well enough.

Five hardback copies of her book, The Nightmare and Its Vicissitudes, marched along on the shelf behind her chair. Their electric blue covers demanded attention. Her name on the book’s spine was clear as a trumpet call. She unpinned her hair and it slipped down over the collar of her suit jacket. Her hair, white at the mostly hidden roots, was a shade of red, auburn, maybe too orange, too even, too perfect, but commanding as she wished it to be.

Her colleagues liked the word vicissitude. Freud had used it. It had always sounded to her like the hiss of a snake. She too liked its dangerous echo. Now she was writing a book on memory or she would write a book on memory. Or maybe she could no longer write a book. Actually for her last book, the one titled Lust and Longing, she had hired a ghostwriter. She didn’t have the time or the energy to write each word herself. It had become hard to form the sentences, to hold them in her head as she was reaching for the next thought. The ghostwriter was a secret. No one would ever know. She would never tell.

Some nights she dreamt in numbers that floated across her brain as if it were a chalkboard. She saw formulas and equations and measurements and theories. She had been the only girl in some classes. But in those classes she had known joy. When she woke from those dreams she felt confident and refreshed, as if somewhere it had rained on dry ground and new seeds might grow.

Things she remembered:

Her mother, what her mother had died of, but she wouldn’t say, not now.

A poem she had memorized in the third grade.

She wouldn’t say it now. No need.

The medical school auditorium and the boy who took her back to his room after the liver function lecture and what happened there. She could remember that and the stuffed monkey with the pink cotton tongue perched on his bookshelf, a remnant from his childhood home, a sign of immaturity she should have taken seriously.

The corpse, the body, her body, and her partner’s, to slice and name. It was female and the pubic hair was black, and the clitoris had withered so it was impossible to find.

The Waterford china plates she had bought in the roadside antique store in Vermont one autumn when they had gone to a wedding. She remembered whose wedding it was: almost. She remembered the inn where they spent the night, the strawberry jam they had for breakfast and Howard running his fingers over her mouth to remove the crumbs that had gathered in the corners.

And then she remembered the red and orange leaves on the trees. They stopped at a road stand to buy a basket of apples, too many apples, most of them soft and bruised.

The black appointment book, there it was under the paper “Object Loss and the Fetish in Early Childhood” that had been sent to her by a Norwegian analyst she had met in Geneva several summers ago.

She had a son. His name was Gerald. She believed in the good enough mother, and all that entailed. But she also believed in spine, upright spine and discipline and order, and she believed that the world rewarded effort. She hired a nanny from Jamaica and went back to work, ten days after Gerald’s arrival. She did not alter her teaching schedule. She added patients as referrals came from the head of this committee or that. She became a training analyst the year Gerald started nursery school.

She was interested in sexual obsessions and wrote and delivered papers at meetings across the country and abroad on transsexual identifications and sadistic or masochistic fantasies. She knew why she was interested in sexual obsessions.

Those subjects have many vicissitudes.

If Gerald was not always in her mind it didn’t mean that he wasn’t present on occasion.

Gerald became a handsome child. She kept his hair long, with bangs hanging almost into his pale blue eyes, and his oblong face, while not like her father’s which had been sharp, intense, alert to danger, seemed kind and peaceable. The nursery school report said he was a good sharer and liked to build towers and would try hard to do puzzles if asked. He was pleased when it was his time to water the plants or feed the hamster.

Howard took the boy to the zoo on Sunday mornings when they were in the city and sometimes took him to the office, letting him crayon on printing paper at his assistant’s desk. The boy was partial to his father: male identification, a defense against Oedipal feelings. She understood: a normal affliction of early childhood that causes havoc in the brain, until death erases its last trace.

She had read all of Margaret Mahler on separation anxiety and the development of the self in the second year of life. She had read all of Anna Freud’s descriptions of the stages of childhood. She knew that sexual thoughts were as natural to the child under seven as the sky above and the soil below. She knew that toilet training involved a separation from what the child misconstrued as a body part, and so became frightened by the flush and disappearance of his own product. She knew that when Gerald woke at night with a dream of fiery dragons about to eat him, or screamed that a building collapse was about to suck him underground, he was only struggling with his desire for her, an illicit desire he would have to abandon.

She read the words of Melanie Klein who was convinced that children wanted to chop up, devour, eat, trample the inner organs of their parents, because of the frustration of their baby genital desires. Maybe or maybe not. She did agree with some of what she had read: underneath the sweetness of the blue pajamas with the little rabbit hopping repeatedly over the sleeves, her son was also in a trap that would not spring. Iron bands of want and need, fastened by fear of retaliation, oiled by guilt, enforced by a desire to murder, accompanied his quite banal childhood. He warmed his little arteries beside a bonfire of ardor for the very persons he might destroy if he weren’t so small and so cute in his bunny pajamas.

Sometimes Dr. Estelle Berman looked at Gerald and saw a demon and sometimes she saw a sleepy child whose thumb was often in his mouth, bending his teeth outward, consoling him for the condition of childhood, which would not be altered by any special pleading in any particular instance.

She had a nine-year analysis of her own. Was it successful? Of course it was successful. She had found the root of her ambition and she had recognized that she was flawed. She knew why she was flawed. She forgave herself, or tried to, for the meanness that swelled up within her when she saw a woman more beautiful, more seductive than she. She understood that rivalry was a normal human condition, as common as heartburn and the occasional bad cold. And there was more, much more, she lost her fear of strangers stalking her. She stopped gaining and losing weight with each shift of her mood. She learned to feel almost comfortable in other people’s homes, even if they were more expensive and glorious than her own. She learned to listen to other people’s boasts and see underneath the bravado, observe the anxiety that settled on the coffee cups after desert. She knew she was a tough lady, and she didn’t expect to become a delicate princess.

She had married well in the Victorian novel sense of the word and this gave her insurance against the vicissitudes of life. She had gold pins and thick bracelets set with rare stones. She had necklaces with pearls and real coral. She had gold earrings she caressed with her fingers when she was deep in thought. Her jewelry was not timid or discreet. It admitted to its expense and required respect.

After her own analysis she no longer believed she was a bad person. Or rather she believed that all persons were bad and she, no worse than her neighbor or her friend or her colleague.

Her patients, on the couch or in the chair, accepted her words, gratefully, most of the time. She knew when to speak and when to wait. It was a skill that was perfected with time. She heard the skipped heartbeats, the gasps, the tiny sounds of pain that patients uttered, one and all, as they repeated the tales of their lives, the crucial facts, the losses, avoidable and unavoidable. She responded to the patient or she did not according to some instinct that told her to wait, more is coming, or speak now or the moment will pass and never return. Each session was a dance, a danse macabre, not a ball. She was responsible. She was sometimes loved and sometimes hated by her patients. She was almost never bored. Patients lied to themselves, they hid their bitter sharp thoughts, or they spilled them out before her like so many pennies in the blind man’s cup, or they wept when they remembered lost love and denied lust. They wept when they saw that their pride was false or their hope futile.

Was she kind? You did not need to be kind to do the work. Was she always right in the way she saw the patient, the story before her, the dream that had been brought to her office? Of course not. She was sometimes right and sometimes kind and frequently she could follow the dream down the royal road of the unconscious and find the buried message that waited there.

Between patients she often changed clothes. She had suits and jackets and shoes for all occasions. She went to professional meetings at her institute. The first Tuesday of every month, she had a committee meeting to discuss the teaching program, the admissions of new students, the appointing of new training analysts. She swam in the waters with others who also knew whom to court, whom to deny, whom to woo. She enjoyed the encounters around the table, in the halls, just as the capos in the back rooms enjoyed their colleagues, their poker games, the urgency of their encounters. She was also an editor of a prominent international psychoanalytic journal which required her to attend meetings in Portugal, in Brazil, in the Loire Valley and other places where psychoanalysts gathered in the summer months, their spouses in tow, their passports in the hotel safe, their afternoons spent in museums and gardens and churches across the globe.

Her father was shot in a bar in Las Vegas over an unpaid gambling debt.

No, that wasn’t true, although she often told the story.

He died in a hospital in Charlottesville of cirrhosis of the liver, which was no surprise to anyone, least of all his daughter.

Most of the time, her patients accepted her words gratefully.

Suddenly on a spring day when the dogwood trees in Central Park were just opening their blossoms, a soft white haze on their limbs, Howard Berman felt a deep pain in his chest and within seconds his lips had turned blue and he was gone. He left his wife enough funds to take care of herself and her near-grown son. At the funeral many prominent psychoanalysts wrote their names in the guest book. Some patients of Dr. Berman also appeared and sat in the back of the room. Was her heart breaking? It was hard to tell as she greeted mourners in her living room. She was composed as she had always been. She knew that death was never a surprise, only relatively sudden. It was always there, ignored or not, it was there. She had her ways of keeping together, allowing fear and grief just so much of its due and no more. She was strong, her friends said. Three days after the funeral she resumed her regular schedule and if she was in some kind of pain, makeup hid the traces.

Nevertheless she was mourning. She paced the apartment. She ached in her bones. She came down with a strep infection and when the fever abated she tripped on a rug in her office and fell, spraining an ankle. She was angry too, bristling at the household help, scowling at the doorman, and cutting her friends off in mid-sentence. At night she curled herself into a fetal position and rocked back and forth in her bed. She knew the worst would pass but that was of no comfort as waves of anxiety, how could she continue, washed over her again and again.

She went to a meeting of psychoanalysts, an editorial meeting of a major journal, and she said nothing at all. As the meeting broke up three other analysts, colleagues, asked her to join them in a taxi. They dropped her off at her corner and then watched as she walked in the wrong direction away from her door. One of the doctors jumped out of the cab and grabbed her elbow. This way, Dr. Berman, he said, and walked her through the lobby and right to the elevator that would take her to her apartment. There was talk. She didn’t hear it.

In the middle of the night Dr. Berman woke up in her bed, felt about for Howard’s arms and legs and his back that was wide and warm with a large mole between the shoulder blades, and remembered that he was gone, and turned on the light. The thought that came to her was not pleasant. She wanted a daughter, a beautiful daughter, whom she would have loved and brought to adulthood. There would be no excess of self-love in her child because she would have been loved enough.

Maybe, maybe not. Dr. Berman knew that like her Chicago colleague, she might have failed. Careful, she warned herself, do not love Justine as if she were yours. Love her only as your patient, which means warily, conditionally, alertly. Wounded birds have a way of dying and sometimes they spread disease.

Lily the cat jumped on the bed, lightly as if a feather had blown onto the blanket.

Justine came late to appointments. The doormen had recognized her and whispered to each other and called down to the superintendent when she came so he could wait in the lobby and catch a glimpse of her long legs when she left. Justine brought her new puppy to her session. It was a small black pug. A gift from an admirer. The pug sat calmly on Justine’s lap. Lily jumped down from the windowsill and arched her back and showed her claws and let out a sound between a scream and a choke. The pug opened its sleepy eyes and jumped down and immediately wet the carpet. Was that the point, to stain something that belonged to her doctor? Dr. Berman picked up Lily and tossed her into the hall. She would have liked to do the same to Justine. But she said instead, Tell me about the abortion, and Justine with more drama than necessary described it all. There was no surprise there for Dr. Berman.

Justine didn’t show up for her next appointment or the one after that.

Dr. Berman walked in the park and considered what mistake she might have made. How could she hold this movie star who always got what she wanted and never got what she wanted? What would have happened if she had let Lily scratch the eyes out of that pug?

She called Justine, just to remind her of her next appointment. I’d like to see you, she said, even if that was not as professional as it ought to have been.

Justine returned. The boyfriend left for Italy for a vacation with his new love. Justine did not want a new love. She wanted to sleep all day and watch television until the stations turned dark.

One of her security staff took the puppy for his children who lived in Long Beach in a small house not far from the ocean.

Justine did not need or want antidepressants. She had her own medicine cabinet and her ways of restocking it whenever necessary.

Dr. Berman answered her phone when it rang loudly at two in the morning. It was Justine wanting to tell her some childhood memory, a sexual play with a neighbor boy. Justine wanted to have all of Dr. Berman, all her waking hours and her sleeping ones as well. Dr. Berman told Justine that she would see her at her appointment later in the week. Her voice was neutral, her tone warm enough, but the truth was Dr. Berman did not like being called in the middle of the night. If she had she might have been an obstetrician.

Justine told Dr. Berman about her mother’s boyfriend who was supposedly painting her mother’s portrait but then it appeared as if he had more in mind than a nude descending a staircase. Justine had been brought to his studio one afternoon and the painter had put his fingers in her vagina when her mother was fixing tea in the kitchen down the hall.

Justine’s mother did not believe her. Justine’s mother often said things to her father in a language that Justine couldn’t understand. Neither of course could her father but that didn’t appease Justine. Also, this mother insisted on sending Justine to a kibbutz where she had to clean out cow dung. Three summers lost, said Justine.

I hate her, Justine said.

We’ll see, said Dr. Berman.

No, said Justine, I really hate her.

Yes, said Dr. Berman.

Do you think I’m beautiful? asked Justine one day.

Do you think you’re beautiful? Dr. Berman returned the question.

Everyone thinks I’m beautiful, said Justine.

And you? asked Dr. Berman.

Justine didn’t like the question and she didn’t answer it.

Some months later Justine said something that pleased Dr. Berman, enough for a real smile.

She said, I think you should call me Betty. I’d like that.

Dr. Berman said, Betty is a good name.

Justine had already tried to drown Justine in a river of vodka.

Then one Thursday morning when the penguins in the zoo were diving into their pool, behind the glass wall that separated them from the visitors who admired the penguins because they endured their imprisonment in the stage set that had become their home without visible signs of misery, Justine, who walked through the park on her way to Dr. Berman’s office, followed by her security people, was jostled by a stranger who put his hands on her chest, before the guys could grab him and shove him and chase him away.

I hate this city, she said to Dr. Berman.

And she decided to go back to LA She had heard from her former boyfriend who was now over the stripper, who was actually an up-and-coming actress who was on location in India, and he had asked Justine to return to him. If she didn’t come right away, he might kill himself.

Really? asked Dr. Berman.

Maybe, said Justine.

At their last session, Justine brought a present for Dr. Berman. I might be back, she said.

After she left Dr. Berman opened the gift. She found a necklace, emerald and diamonds and a large black pearl at the center in a Duane Reade tissue box. In the box was a note in tiny handwriting. This came from Cartier’s. You can’t return it. Don’t mention my name if anyone asks where it came from. Thanks and love from Betty.

Daughters grow up and leave, thought Dr. Berman. Even real daughters do that. Patients interrupt their treatment before they are ready to be on their own and psychoanalysts lose their patients before they are ready to let them go. It happens all the time. Dr. Berman could tell you about others, other times. But that night she opened a good bottle of Merlot that Howard had been saving for her birthday, the one he missed by dying, was it five years ago or more? She stood at her window and watched the people in their warm winter coats walking dogs, rushing along to the theater, to dinner at the restaurant a few blocks away, to a wedding perhaps, or a celebration of a promotion or a victory of some kind over someone else of course. She saw the lights in the apartments across the park, small flickers in the distance, where people were gathered, families were building up resentments in the way that families do, envy and fear served with the evening’s microwaved lamb chops.

Standing at the window like one of those figureheads at the prow of a sailing ship, a figure carved in wood, painted reds and blues and yellows to show the sea that the ship was protected by a large and looming female. She felt wooden, as if her limbs would not bend on command. She felt cold and useless.

If she had a real daughter she might call her now. But she did not.

A few nights later she was listening to a paper at a seminar meeting titled “Passive-Aggressive Behavior and Personality Disorders.” They were in a meeting room at the institute seated at a round table, small bottles of sparkling water had been placed in front of all the participants, a recording machine on a small trolley glowed red to signal its working state. The presenter was speaking in a low voice. Dr. Berman leaned forward in her seat. She could hardly make out the words. The young woman appeared to be whispering into the microphone. Dr. Berman closed her eyes and fell asleep. All the participants at the seminar including the speaker pretended not to notice. The speaker, who had been a student of Dr. Berman’s in her third year at the institute, wondered if she was boring everyone there. A few of the other younger participants thought that the paper was less well done than they had originally thought. But the older analysts understood: the day is long, the effort of listening takes its toll, sometimes even the best of the analyzed are awake in the small hours of the morning and sleepless they flounder through their day.

Sometimes the mind has had enough of other people’s words and wants to be alone with itself.

Dr. Z. said to Dr. H., Did you see the necklace Estelle was wearing tonight?

Dr. H. hadn’t noticed the necklace because he had a cataract in his left eye and had no interest in women’s wear, a fact his wife had complained about often.

Why? he asked Dr. Z.

Dr. Z. said, It looked like diamonds and emeralds and quite extraordinary.

Dr. H. said, Real?

Dr. Z. said, I don’t know.

Dr. H. said, Probably not. Who would wear such a thing to a discussion of “Femininity and Fantasy in the Silent Film.”

Dr. Z. said, Boring talk.

Dr. H. said, Very.

Dr. Z. said, I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan.

Dr. H. said, Me, I prefer Star Wars.

Dr. Z. said, The boy in you.

Dr. H. said, The boy in me.

Dr. Z. said, I had a patient who told me his favorite moments of every W. C. Fields movie ever made. Also all Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello plots.

Dr. H. said, How long did that go on?

Dr. Z., Too long.

Dr. H., What was he doing?

Dr. Z., Stalling.

Dr. H., And then?

Dr. Z., He was killed in a car crash.

Dr. H., Not funny.

Dr. Z., No.