three

There was a long list in Dr. Z.’s head of things he didn’t believe. It was far longer than the list of things he did believe. It began with the resurrection of Jesus, the power of prayer, the good intentions of the state, the possibility of political salvation, the kindness of strangers, and went on to the pathos of Santa Claus and his reindeer and along the way it swept up all but the pursuit of happiness. Dr. Z. did believe in the pursuit if not in the possession of happiness.

On the other hand there were days, hours, long periods of time when he was happy. What that meant when he questioned himself was that he felt no need to be anywhere other than where he was. He had brought his desires for greater recognition, more public acclaim, more love, and more wealth to heel. His long face, his balding head seemed just the right one for his big body. He believed that the beast that was man would never change for the better but could always be worse than expected. This thought did not make him grieve. It was calming in its way. He expected no miracles and accepted the bloodlust of nature and the raw devouring needs of selves, his own included. However he suffered when his children were disappointed. He suffered when his wife was threatened with mutating cells in her left breast. He suffered when his patients felt hopeless or alone. He would have said this suffering was a sign of life. Without it he would have been a walking corpse. He was not a walking corpse. This was proved when a beautiful young woman walked past him on her way to another table in a restaurant and his loins jumped up and a flush came to his face and he moved his napkin over the offending organ.

She will have one, said Dr. H.

It’s the third time, said Dr. Z.

Not unusual, said Dr. H.

She’s afraid it will never happen, said Dr. Z.

I’m sorry, said Dr. H.

The loss of a baby is—, said Dr. Z.

Not a baby, said Dr. H.

Not yet, said Dr. Z.

I’m sorry, said Dr. H.

Ronit told me not to come over, said Dr. Z.

Just for now, said Dr. H.

She’ll try again, said Dr. Z.

It will happen, said Dr. H.

Dr. H. was expecting a new patient. He was not nervous but he was alert as if the curtain in a theater was about to rise, the audience was settling down. The lights were slowly dimming. And he, ready, focused on the stage, hopeful. Left open on his computer screen on his desk, facing away from the patient’s chair, was a recipe for Mediterranean lamb stew. Dr. H. cooked for his wife, for his friends, for the sheer pleasure of taste and smell and pride in his offerings. Dr. H. read recipes the way other men read the sports pages. Joy, it gave him joy. His children had learned to eat oysters and eel and turned up their small noses at things like pasta and cheese without a sprinkling of parsley or a portion of spicy sausage.

The patient was an older man, a widower, referred by his internist, who had, after many costly tests, found nothing to explain the man’s stomach ailments, his headaches, and his lethargy.

In the first moments after he opened the door there would be an awkwardness, shyness on the part of physician and his patient, who was not yet his patient, was just a man in an office with a stranger who might become more than a stranger or might not. Dr. H. knew, because the internist had told him, that the man, Mike Wilson (Wilson changed from Winofsky), age seventy-two, had been a CBS journalist and then the producer of the nightly news on a cable channel and had also published four books for children. He had retired two years ago just after his wife had died.

As Dr. H. waited for the bell to ring he straightened his tie. A disheveled analyst might alarm an already disheveled patient.

And then he was there, in the soft chair, his umbrella in the basket outside the door, his white hair still thick and somewhat long. His face, his ruined face, bony and sad, marked by a bang on the chin from a fall from a tree in a distant Brooklyn boyhood. He looked at Dr. H. and swiveled his head. Like a camera scanning from left to right, he observed all the colors, all the objects, all the shelves of books, the rocking chair in the corner, the box of children’s toys on a low chest.

I understand, said Dr. H., you haven’t been feeling so well.

No, said his new patient. I haven’t.

A woman, thought Dr. H., would now begin to speak. A man would wait to see if it was safe. A man would make sure the other man in the room would not be dangerous. A man would stay on his side of the wall until he could not any longer. Dr. H. said, I understand that you lost your wife.

Mike Wilson said, Her name was Lourdes. We were colleagues. We met in Buenos Aires.

Dr. H. saw that his patient’s hands had lifted as if to hide his face and then lowered to his lap as the gesture was suppressed. Dr. H. asked if his patient was having trouble sleeping. He spoke in his softest voice. It had the quality of a dust-speckled moonbeam floating through the room. The voice said: safe, quiet, private, not like the park, not like a restaurant, not like your friend’s living room, but something else, a hiding place, without noise, a place where thought was sacred and an attempt would be made, a valiant attempt (be brave, patient, or would-be patient, of mine) to speak the truth, to rush after the truth, to force it from its hiding places.

Mike Wilson said, I would be willing to die now. I’ve had a full life. I don’t need more. This was a statement. It was not dramatic. It was said the way a person speaks of the rain and mentions that he has forgotten his umbrella.

Dr. H. nodded, Often, after a great loss people find it hard to continue.

Silence.

Dr. H. said into the silence, Tell me about your wife.

Mike Wilson’s internist had referred him to both a male and a female doctor. He had chosen the male. Perhaps that was a mistake.

It had been a year, Mike Wilson explained that he was tired, tired by ten in the morning, but of course that was because he couldn’t get to sleep until the sinking moon appeared outside his window and no sleeping aid seemed to work for more than a few days.

How did your wife die? asked Dr. H.

Mike Wilson answered swiftly, the way you respond to the customs officer on your return to the United States, no plants, no foods, no purchases over a few hundred dollars.

She died of lung cancer at home. We had excellent hospice care.

Only the drumming of fingers on the arm of the chair indicated that there was more to say, much more to say, but Dr. H. knew that would come. Inside his own chest he felt a dull ache, a wish to spare himself, a desire to get out of his chair and pace the room. He said, Tell me how she died. Were you with her?

And Mike Wilson told him about his son and daughter-in-law and told him about his other son who had not been able to come to the funeral, reasons to be explained later. He told him about the bottles of oxygen and the last thing that Lourdes had said to him: something to do with a soccer goal she had scored in high school.

Melancholy, loss, mourning, pathological or not—was there really a “not”? Dr. H. knew more about the subject than he would tell his patient. He knew enough to say almost nothing. Mike Wilson fell into the silence and said, I’ve been in three war zones, I’ve seen people die before. You see it immediately, the skin turns pale, the body is empty of itself, you know it, no question.

That’s true, said Dr. H., but there are still a lot of questions to ask.

I know all the answers, said Mike Wilson.

Dr. H. said, If you did you would be sleeping.

Mike Wilson said, I’ve lost my appetite: not just for food.

Dr. H., I think you might want something else before you die.

I’m seventy-two, said Mike Wilson. And I’ve had enough.

Are you a gambling man? Mike Wilson asked Dr. H.

Silence.

You want to make a bet I don’t live to Thanksgiving?

What year? asked Dr. H.

This year, said Mike Wilson.

You know the odds? asked Dr. H.

Mike Wilson smiled. This was a good game.

I don’t bet, said Dr. H., ending the game.

There are days and months and years ahead, not as many as there once were, but enough to appreciate. It could be good to be alive.

It won’t, said Mike Wilson, but nevertheless he agreed to meet with Dr. H. and try. All he had to lose was time and money. He had nothing better to do with his time and the money he had in the bank. The trip he and Lourdes were planning to take to the Norwegian fjords, the trip they had postponed until it was too late, that trip would be transformed into visits with Dr. H. Also, there was that other money, the money he wouldn’t touch, in the safety deposit box, not his exactly, deep in the steel vault, two stories down from the street, a secret he vowed to keep from Dr. H.

Mike Wilson wanted to die, but not quite yet.

Mike Wilson dreamt he was in the studio and they were on-air and suddenly the anchor, Rory Cane, a man with wide lips and weary black eyes, began to whisper, and his voice got lower and lower and no one could hear him and the technicians were rushing around and sparks were flying from the wires strung from klieg lights and then the anchor took off his jacket and there was blood on his shirt. Someone had shot him.

Who shot him? asked Dr. H.

I don’t know, said Mike Wilson. He was a good guy. He hadn’t said a word against Mohammad or expressed any opinion on any matter at all. He was known to cheat at poker and a few people held it against him but I doubt they would shoot him.

Yes, said Dr. H.

He did once put his arm around Lourdes when we were covering the convention in Anaheim.

And? said Dr. H.

I didn’t mind, said Mike Wilson. I didn’t own her.

Uh-huh, said Dr. H.

You want to prescribe something for me? asked Mike Wilson. I have no objection to mind-altering drugs.

How much are you drinking? asked Dr. H.

Not enough, said Mike Wilson, not as much as when I was in Kuwait.

I’ll prescribe something, said Dr. H., but think of it as a thin blanket, hardly enough to keep out the frost, not enough to keep your heart pumping, just enough to let us talk.

All right, said Mike Wilson. But nothing was all right.

Lourdes wore her hair loose and long. It went down to the middle of her spine. It was dark brown and soft and her nose was too wide and too long but her eyesight was perfect and she missed nothing. She could get angry quickly and just as quickly her anger turned to lust or affection, or song. I could bring you a photograph, said Mike Wilson.

Just tell me, said Dr. H., I prefer your words.

Lourdes liked to frighten me by swimming too far out in the sea. She was a good swimmer but sometimes I could hardly see her and the waves were high and loud.

Lourdes ran every morning in the park. She often smelled of sweat and soap and her legs were strong enough to hold me down on the bed and no matter how I struggled she wouldn’t let me up until I—. Mike Wilson stopped. This was not the sort of thing you talked about.

Dr. H. said, Tell me more about her.

Mike Wilson stopped talking. He felt a great pressure on his chest. Was he having a heart attack? He felt a hot flash on his face, a grief came over him and there were no words to describe it, no words that he could form in his throat, his non-cooperating tongue was still and he would have been weeping, if he was the sort of man who wept, instead he coughed, he shook his head from side to side, he seemed to have let out a sound, perhaps a sigh, but it was involuntary, and he rejected the sound he heard coming from his own body.

There was silence in the room. The analyst waited and the patient knew the analyst was waiting and he wished he could speak but he couldn’t.

The analyst said, What would Lourdes have wanted for you after her death? Did you talk about it?

Mike Wilson said, She said she wanted me to be happy.

And did you believe her? asked Dr. H.

I don’t know, said Mike Wilson.

It was six months later when Mike Wilson told Dr. H. that his second son, Ivan, had been out of touch with his parents for five years. He was out of the country, living under a different name, unable to call or write. He had done something ungodly, this son who went to a private school on the Upper West Side and had excellent grades, played tennis on the school team, went on to his second choice college which was fine enough in New England and was gifted, really gifted, Mike Wilson assured Dr. H., in math, and then he got a job with a firm downtown, a very prominent firm.

Ivan had a slight tic in his left eye, he had a love of jazz and he played the drums in a band he had formed with some friends. He was an ordinary boy, said Mike Wilson. He never took drugs or at least only the usual ones at parties. He didn’t have a drinking problem, at least as far as we knew. He had a girlfriend from a rich family. They had a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue and a house in Sag Harbor, maybe that was it, the boats in the bay, he loved her boats.

Dr. H. was beginning to be able to guess the end of this tale. He said nothing.

It was in the New York Post. It was in The New York Times, at first just in the business section but then it moved on to the first page. Ivan was the youngest of those indicted. In telling the story Mike Wilson stopped himself from making the excuses he used with close friends, with Lourdes. It was the culture of greed, it was the opportunity that couldn’t be resisted. Everyone was doing it. The excuses did not seem convincing in Dr. H.’s office. Ivan disappeared before the trial. He forfeited the bail his girlfriend had posted. In the following year Mike and Lourdes read that she was married to a prominent novelist and had moved to Wyoming.

Wherever he was, Mike said, he had missed his mother’s funeral. He probably didn’t know she had died. He probably didn’t know how much she had hoped he would appear in the last weeks by her bedside.

So, said Dr. H., you have had two losses, not just one.

Ivan is not dead, said Mike Wilson.

Dr. H. said nothing.

But he might as well be, said Mike Wilson into the room. His voice bitter, strong, not that of a grieving man but that of an aggrieved man, betrayed by his son and abandoned by his wife (through no fault of her own).

After the session, on his way home, he was not thinking of his own death. He was not the sort of man to kick a small animal but he considered it as a stray cat crossed in front of him and dashed under the wheels of a parked car. Filthy beast, he thought as he passed.

He thought he might write a memoir. He had been around a good many floods, some hurricanes and political campaigns, funerals of presidents, and there was the war in Lebanon and the Kuwait desert. He knew what it felt like to wake up every day smelling like mold and fungus, the aftertaste of spices and alcohol, headache, lice in the hair, excited, ready, as if he were in a movie and celluloid-immortal. There, over there, he was always close to someone, a fellow journalist, a subject giving an interview, a child sitting on the curbside, and the sound of tanks moving and something in the sky, always lurking, ready to kill. He liked it. And then there was the Austrian photographer, Hannah, who now possessed his sweatshirt, a very small chip of his heart, and continued to exist in his mind for erotic purposes, now especially when he had the entire bed to himself all night long. Now that he was guilt-free or as guilt-free as a civilized man can be.

Dr. H. had said, You don’t cheat on the dead by living.

It was kind of him to say that, but of course it wasn’t true.

Lourdes had complained, he hadn’t wanted to come back, to take a promotion, to stay in the city and be safe. He had little interest in safety. He did it for her and for Jeff, his oldest son, and for Ivan, Ivan-the-lost and Ivan-the-guilty, the bond money gone, Ivan.

Dr. H. considered his patient, the father who had never had a conscious criminal thought in his head. He considered the mother who had once stood outside the school doors waiting for her child to run up the steps. From her office phone she arranged his membership in the West Side Soccer Club. She made his dentist appointments and arranged for the babysitter to take him and his older brother to a music class, or a baseball practice or a play date with another boy who would also wear a Spider-Man costume on Halloween. What was missing in this boy that he could not resist the lure of easy money? Or was it something dangerous in the world that had caused the shards of glitter to fall into his heart, causing him to do the illegal thing for the reward of a bauble, an apartment, a suit of armor made of champagne corks, a place in the sun in a gated community that his father or his older brother could never afford and had never wanted.

Mike Wilson took Lourdes’ scarves out of her drawer. He had not touched them since her death. They were long and silk and some had flowers and some had geometric lines, black and white they appeared to be a mathematician’s dream.

Lourdes, went back to work a year after Ivan was born. She had been in a consciousness-raising group and one after another the woman began to receive paychecks and she was not the first or the last. She had taught calculus in a girls’ school until March before her death. Her colleagues had come to the funeral and kissed him on the cheek or squeezed his hand and said they would miss her. Yes, yes, he had said, and was relieved when he knew their names.

She wore the scarves in her hair, or she wore them with her black coat. She wore them the way a parrot wears its tail, they just came with her every day. He would give them all to his daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t wear them but she would keep them, in honor of Lourdes. He wanted to honor Lourdes. He would give this daughter-in-law the wedding ring, the simple band with a single diamond chip set into the gold. She had her own wedding band but it was time, it was important now to get that wedding band out of his chest of drawers, to move it on to another place. It weighed on him in the drawer.

He would not look at the photograph albums (his married son did not have leather-bound albums, he had online photos on his desktop). He didn’t want to see his boys at the beach the summer they rented a mosquito-filled house in Fire Island. He didn’t want to see lost teeth and birthday cakes and team trophies. He didn’t want to see time slipping away. He especially didn’t want to see Ivan, his slightly bucktoothed smile waving to the camera at his brother’s engagement party. He especially didn’t want to see Ivan whom he would never see again. He didn’t want to see Ivan who belonged in jail, had been sentenced in absentia to ten years, who had disappeared and forfeited the bail money that had been posted by his girlfriend. He didn’t want to think about Ivan at all but a man can’t choose his thoughts and Ivan unbidden came again and again.

I’m haunted, he told Dr. H.

Too bad I’m not an exorcist, said Dr. H.

You could try, said Mike Wilson.

And what demon was it exactly that had run away with the boy that Ivan had been, citing the stats of every New York Yankee since 1921, unable to eat if his beloved Giants lost a game?

Mike Wilson’s great-grandfather had danced at the Yom Kippur ball as the nineteenth century was ending. That night he had kissed the seamstress who would become his wife. On a tenement rooftop, under a scratchy wool blanket, the September air still warm, he had sent his genes into a welcoming place and those genes would be American, free of accent, free of shame. His story from that point onward would be the story of Pilgrims and Indians and of flags on the ramparts still standing. American history was itself just a few hundred years old, not thousands of years, like his old history, which had grown wretched and patched and useless as his own father’s tattered texts muttered into an indifferent sky over Vilna, Vilna, a stopover in the years of exile: a burden to carry in the age of reason. Mike Wilson’s great-grandfather hoped that his grandchildren would live in a town where no one could recall Job’s name or identify with his fate. Justice, equality, decent wages, indoor plumbing, it all seemed possible.

That was the cartoon version. The real story had something to do with brothers quarreling and tuberculosis and a failed hardware business and two children buried in the city of the dead in outer Queens and a wife who was the kind of mother who hit her children whenever the mood came on her. Mike Wilson only knew that his own mother had been kind and dreamy and loved crossword puzzles and mystery stories and his own father had wanted to be a pilot but had become a schoolteacher and no one in the family had been in court for more than a traffic ticket and Ivan’s arrest had not simply been a matter of public shame, but of private despair.

Dr. H. considered the question of Ivan. There was an explanation for the crime, another side of the story. The young man possessed a soul that had its reasons. Dr. H. preferred to understand rather than judge. Nevertheless he did not admire the behavior of this young man. Was he a capitalist pig or a hungry child who stumbled and broke apart? Why did he fall? Was this the old question of Adam in the garden? Or was it a gene missing a twist, or burdened with an extra curl. Dr. H. knew enough to avoid the problem of good and evil especially when it came to his patients and their children.

In fact he was angry at Ivan, on behalf of his father and his dead mother and perhaps of all those who didn’t cheat. Ivan came in multiples, Ivan was many Ivans and they all had big bank accounts. Everywhere in the city, money was flowing and falling and changing hands and there was a race going on, a race for the best, most expensive view of the park or the river, there was a pounding on the doors of the stores on Madison Avenue where a hairbrush cost as much as a bus driver’s monthly salary. There were tuitions and clothes and china plates and labels that meant something to those who wore them and the city was rippling with anxiety over who had everything and who had nothing and who would gain more and how to show what one had and how to keep it safe and make it grow and how to be better, a better bigger house in the country, a better bigger home theater, a better bigger cash flow, in and in and in. This was a city in which little children compared the monetary value of their birthday presents. Dr. H. sighed. He himself sometimes regretted not becoming a heart surgeon. Sometimes he too wanted to be able to fly first class to China and satisfy all his wants, one after another. There was a particular range stove he would have liked that cost as much as a small airplane.

Accumulation, competition, this was the addiction that humbled the city, that caused it to tremble in the predawn hours, the stench of avarice came off both rivers and wore down the citizens of the city, who scrambled like ants building their mountain of grains, fearing always the foot that would smash, the hand that would hammer, the end of the game.

If one thought of it, money was not so much the root of all evil but the air one breathed, the source of life itself, the energy that turned the wheels that made the city run day after day. Cash was needed not for survival but for flash and bravado, for astonishment and amusement, for security, a goal that kept receding into the mists as you came closer. Security was not a Swiss bank account. It was a state of mind as illusive and fleeting as joy. Once upon a time it was enough if you could feed your family. Now you needed to have more than your neighbor, who must therefore have less.

In his office with his bookshelves spilling over with old copies of the journals and the periodicals and the volumes of biography and the collected papers and the dusty whisper they seemed to make if you listened carefully, Dr. H. felt like a garage mechanic, a psychoanalytic garage mechanic, outside his little cell, shoes with spike heels cost as much as a racehorse, and money, the flow of it, the feel of it, the terror of losing it, fueled the motors of the real world, a world in which bundling did not mean cuddling and deals were cut with very sharp scissors. In that world his office, the little office of Dr. H. was of no importance at all.

Far away from Mount Eden, the cemetery where Lourdes was buried, sat the golden statues in the Vatican storehouse as well as the Picassos, the Matisses, the Andy Warhols that were hung on the walls of the princes of Wall Street. Yes, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, but the unconscious, even under the analyst’s keen eye, was not an item you could buy or sell. Dr. H. regretted that he lived in relative poverty. He regretted that money and its rewards had passed him by. No, he didn’t regret that. What he minded was that all he held dear was less valued than it had been. Insight, thought, nature itself, affection, all seemed like fourth prizes in a contest he had not chosen to enter, but was in nevertheless. The devil stole away Mike Wilson’s child and stuck his finger in Dr. H.’s eye.

Dr. H. did not accept his own dark thoughts as the complete truth. Perhaps they were a product of some shame of his own. He believed in personal responsibility.

He believed in choice and he believed that Ivan might not be lost forever because you never know, not really, what might happen, unlikely as it seems, Ivan could return and redeem his days. Psychoanalysts are not seers or prophets, not judges, not makers or shakers. If all goes well they may be able to work like sheep dogs and round up a few strays and press them back into the herd.

There was a day when Mike Wilson thought while eating a stale croissant at Starbucks, I lost my wife and my son but I have Dr. H. As long as I can pay for him, I have Dr. H. And by now he knew that Dr. H. was also a stand-in for his own father, brother, son, wife, mother, and something of a shape-shifter inhabiting his imagination while still knowing exactly how long forty-five minutes lasted, while knowing exactly the many ways Mike Wilson had to deceive himself and knowing how much regret a man could bear without breaking into fragments that could never be put back together again.

At least Mike Wilson hoped that was so. Perhaps it wasn’t.

Are you hoping that your son will contact you one day when he feels enough time has gone by? said Dr. H.

It has been six years, said Mike Wilson. I call his old friends from high school. I call his college roommate every six months. I call his old girlfriend who hangs up on me. If this were a movie, I’d find a clue. A phone call would come at three in the morning with a stranger whispering a country name, an address into the air. I would open an unmarked envelope and find a blank page and then notice the stamp, the country of origin. But I am not hoping.

Dr. H. said, Hope will not harm you.

Mike Wilson sat in the leather chair opposite Dr. H. and wanted to tell him, wanted to tell someone, about the volcano that sat in his breast sending fire and ash up into his brain. The lava that flowed down from that volcano, the lava that was the dark hot stuff of his love for his child, his child who had done a criminal thing, his child whom he would never see again.

You are angry at him, said Dr. H.

Yes, said Mike Wilson, who actually was exhausted, bone-achingly exhausted from loss. How angry can an exhausted man get?

I’m too old, said Mike Wilson, to have another child.

Not too old, said Dr. H., to have another wife.

I don’t want another wife, said Mike Wilson. The idea of another woman made him want to smash his head into the wall, the one with Dr. H.’s poster of the Sistine Chapel that he had picked up at an international psychoanalytic meeting in Florence. Did Dr. H. identify with God and that outstretched arm?

Absolutely not.

On rare occasions only.

Dr. H. knew that his patient did not know his own mind, that is the way it was with patients.

Lourdes had sat through every day of the trial. She stared at the jury, memorizing all their faces. She did not insist as the lawyer did that her son was innocent, but she hugged him in front of the reporters so they would know that this man was not an outlaw but someone’s beloved child. Of course he was also an outlaw, an anti-Robin Hood, who had robbed the poor to serve the rich.

Do you ever think, asked Dr. H., that Ivan and his troubles gave Lourdes lung cancer?

No, said Mike Wilson, of course not. But then he said into the waiting silence, It may have made her vulnerable, broken some resistance, made her not want to breathe.

And one day he said to Dr. H., Maybe it was Lourdes’ fault. Maybe she loved him too much and spoiled him, so he thought he could get away with anything. She thought he was perfect. He probably believed her. There was a hint of a whine in Mike Wilson’s voice.

Did you say that to her? asked Dr. H.

No, said Mike Wilson.

But there it was in the room, the son and the father, and the eternal Oedipus that must be endured for all to survive with 20/20 vision. Dr. H. heard it as if a gong had struck on a mountaintop and the echo slowly drifted down into the valley below. The father, a mere mortal, had sometimes been jealous of his son, in the way that fathers and sons have wrestled from the beginning of time. There was in Ivan’s flight some fragment of victory for the journalist who was himself away from his hearth for many months, leaving the mother and the son to themselves. It would take a long time and multiple gentle hints before Mike Wilson might see this himself, but Dr. H. would try in time, because he believed it was true and truth was the antibiotic of the mind.

We were in Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital waiting for her name to be called. We were in a beautiful room with a view of the river outside. I went to get a Coke from the machine in the hall and when I came back Lourdes said, I’m done and I said all right. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Mike Wilson looked at Dr. H. He was ready to catch any expression on his face that might tell him if he had been negligent, ignorant, selfish. He had of course been all those things. Did Dr. H. think he was a dishonorable man?

If he did it didn’t show on his face.

Why should he care what Dr. H. thought of him? He shouldn’t. But he did. He was tied to Dr. H. who was insisting he live, who wanted him to live, and so he would live for a while, because Dr. H. was trying so hard to keep him above ground, where Mike Wilson had to admit the possibilities were not all bad, at least not yet.

And then Dr. H. announced that he was taking a vacation in early April. There would be missed appointments. Money saved, thought Mike Wilson, although he would have preferred it if Dr. H. had remained in his office. Of course he knew that Dr. H. had a life of his own, maybe a family with children, but it still seemed wrong of him, to so easily take a vacation. He himself did not want to go anywhere. Where would he go, a man alone.

The air became warmer, there were some buds on the trees in the park, there were lilacs in the buckets at the markets on Broadway. There were more skateboards on the streets. The restaurants were putting tables and chairs on the sidewalks.

Dr. H., his wife and son and daughter went to Belize. The palm trees were everywhere. The houses were pink and blue and along the road from the airport to their hotel on the shore, noses pressed against flimsy fences, donkeys watched the cars go by.

In the hotel lobby as they were checking in, Dr. H. saw the sign for a flat-bottom fishing trip, a photo of a huge tarpon decorated the poster, a four-hour trip, leaving at 6 a.m. His heart jumped. Yes, he wanted to do that. Yes, he loved fishing which his wife thought revolting and cruel. His son would come and he would, he would do it. His daughter refused. She was not yet eight. She felt sorry for the fish. Was it cruel? He preferred to eat what he caught. But the truth was that he liked the long wait for the hit on the end of the line. He liked the joy that jumped in his chest as he reeled in the shinning creature, scales, blank eyes, thrashing and struggling for its life. He liked the victory. He liked the murder. He liked the taste, he liked the sight of the fish in the bottom of the boat, his fish, his catch. I’m not a saint, he said to himself, and that was that.

His wife worked for a nonprofit, raising funds for tutoring programs in the inner city. She volunteered at an organization that arranged for the children of incarcerated drug dealers to go to the circus or spend a few weeks at a summer camp. On the beach in Belize she forgot the forlorn and the downtrodden and danced at night in her husband’s arms, and helped her children collect shells and allowed her daughter to place a live crab on her thigh, and wore a bikini that made her husband grab her from behind and hold on so long that his son complained, Let go Dad, which made his wife laugh, which made him happy.

In bed at night she said to him, Maybe we should move here.

Maybe we shouldn’t, he said.

There must be a great need on this island for psychoanalysts, she said.

Sure, he said.

I’m thinking, she said, you could go back to real medicine, you could be a GP and take care of the natives and the tourists: stomachaches and sunburn.

Tempting, he said.

I’m sure they could use you, she said. She wasn’t serious.

I wish, he said, I could have been Dr. Salk. I wish I had been the one to discover the polio vaccine but since I was born too late I think I’ll just continue to see my patients.

Are you bored? she asked. Are you ever bored?

No, he said, and then the Tequila Sunrise hit him and he closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep.

At breakfast she said to him, You’re my hero.

Sure, he said.

You don’t have doubts? She pinched his arm.

About what? he asked.

Oh you know, she said.

His youngest child took a running leap into the pool. Look at me, said the child.

I’m looking, he said, turning back to his wife. If a small splash of human happiness is added to the atmosphere, then I have been of use. If I remove a pain, an unnecessary fear, unblock the repression, undo the guilt, pull someone out of the cave they are hiding in, then I am doing as well as can be expected.

All right, she said, and put her third croissant with strawberry jam into her mouth.

Maybe we should invite my mother for dinner when we get back, she said.

Do you want to go water-skiing this afternoon? he said.

And two days later, his face somewhat pink despite the sunblock his wife had smoothed across his nose again and again, his arms beginning to tan, his tenth attempt to read Remembrance of Things Past not yet abandoned, he was on the dock where the boat waited as the sky blushed with morning sun and the white sliver of a dying moon was about to fall into the distant turquoise sea. The captain of their fishing boat shook his hand, patted the boy on his shoulder, and asked them to sit down as they motored out to the flats. On the shore the palm trees bent and cast their shadows on the sand and his wife opened her eyes, happy not to be fishing, happy he was fishing, happy to feel the warm air on her arms, and wondered if she was too old to have another child. Maybe not.

The captain had an assistant, a native boy who put bait on the hooks, who showed them how to cast far out into the waters, who took the bonefish that the boy caught and placed it on a bench and banged its head in with a hammer and tossed it into a bucket. The captain said his name was Harry and he was an American who had come to Belize because he wanted to live on the water, and he owned this boat and two others. The sky was cloudless. The morning was perfect.

Dr. H. had a tarpon on his line. It circled the boat again and again in an attempt to break the line. Clever tarpon, its desire to live churning up the aqua sea, fierce and unyielding, until one hour and twelve minutes later, exhausted, it rose against the boat’s side. Good work, said Captain Harry, who had given instructions the entire time and probably deserved the credit for the capture. The tarpon was released back into the water. You don’t have to eat or kill everything in the sea, said Captain Harry, and there was something in the way he spoke, the rhythm of the words, that caught Dr. H.’s attention. And then he looked carefully at the fisherman and he saw that his face was familiar, not exactly like the one he knew, but similar. Was it the curve of the mouth? Was it the nose which was longer than many but not unusual? Was it something in the smile? Had his patient mentioned overlapping front teeth? Captain Harry’s eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. Were those glasses hiding a tic? Of course that was ridiculous, the odds of such a thing were impossible.

Where did you grow up? Dr. H. asked as the boat seemed to glide across the shallow waters. Not here, said Captain Harry. Where? said Dr. H. North, said Captain Harry, where it snowed. I hated the snow. Captain Harry turned to his ropes and his reels that rested in holders clipped to the gunnels of the boat. Of course it was ridiculous. He was imagining, he was losing distance between himself and his patient. He would have to examine his overidentification with his patient. It was absurd but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

The boat moved close to the shore of an island, covered in thick green ferns, palms, birdsong overhead, birds fighting, a spitting sound above. There were rocks beneath, and schools of small colored fish darted behind waving underwater plants. In the branches of a palm tree on the nearby shore his son saw a red and golden parrot. Hey look at that, Dad, he said, and pointed.

And Dr. H., without thinking, without calculation, said loudly to the captain who had his back turned, Ivan, what kind of parrot is that? And the captain turned around, frightened, amazed, a tension in his shoulders. Harry, he said, my name is Harry.

Six days later, early on the morning that they were scheduled to leave for the airport and the return trip to New York, Dr. H., having carefully weighed the pros and the cons of what he was about to do, walked to the dock and saw the boat waiting at the end and Captain Harry drinking coffee from his thermos and his assistant piling soft drinks into the cooler for the customers who would soon arrive, a lawyer and his girlfriend who was somebody else’s wife, but who cared in the forgiving warmth of the new daylight.

Dr. H. walked down to the edge of the dock. He took a bulky letter he had written on hotel stationery out of his pocket and handed it to the captain who had turned his back when he saw him approaching but his way was blocked. Captain Harry took the letter and later, after he had brought the lawyer and his girlfriend back to the dock, after he had washed the smell of terrified tarpon off his calloused hands, he opened the envelope.

Ivan, it said, call your father. He needs you. And inside the letter was a cell phone, which if anyone traced would come back to Dr. H. sitting in his office in New York City, who would claim he had lost his cell phone on a vacation in Belize. Inside the small perfect phone was a listing of only one patient, all the other numbers had been erased. Mr. Mike Wilson’s address and number were there for Ivan.

Of course he shouldn’t have done that, Dr. H. scolded himself as soon as he had fastened his seat belt and pulled Remembrance of Things Past out of his carry-on bag. Analysts do not interfere in their patients’ real lives. It spoils the work. It changes everything. It isn’t professional. And perhaps he was wrong, in which case the countertransference, the over-involvement, would not matter very much and be washed out to sea like a leftover plastic glass holding the remains of a Tequila Sunrise with its little paper parasol covered in wet sand.

How was your vacation? asked Dr. Z.

And Dr. H. told him, No real names used.

Wishful thinking, said Dr. Z.

No, said Dr. H.

Magical thinking, said Dr. Z.

No, said Dr. H.