7

It was two months or more after the reunion that Will e-mailed Elizabeth to apologize. He hadn’t intended to put it off so long, but the wording kept tripping him up; he wrote draft after draft that he never sent. Please forgive me, he’d begin, typically, or at least understand my ill-advised request. Then he’d pause, delete ill-advised, or foolish, or ridiculous, whichever he’d chosen, put it back in, take it out, try to come up with a better word, fail, continue, as proceeding from the context. I find such events disorienting, and it seems that a couple of glasses of wine were sufficient to enflame my imagination. You have my word that I will not pursue the matter we discussed. Best, Will. He’d read it over, change a few words, change the last sentence. You have my word that, though I remain interested in the question of your daughter’s paternity, I will not attempt to contact her. He’d change it back, delete the letter in its entirety, write another that was, but for a few articles and commas, identical to the first.

Finally, one day, it was already September, after a lengthening pause during which he wasn’t so much thinking as staring, he hit the send button.

She hasn’t replied. Not after a week, not after a month. Of course, he should never have voiced what was, he understood too late, a fantasy. A mistake to have mentioned anything about hair to Elizabeth. He blew it, and undoubtedly this was for the best. So why does he continue to check the mail so assiduously? Why, after more than a month of silence, is he still waiting to hear from Elizabeth? Thinking about making love to her? Well, not love. Plank would be the word. It’s with pleasure that he imagines himself planking Elizabeth, changing the expression on her face from one of self-satisfaction to . . . to what? Astonishment. The one indelibly delightful memory of the reunion was the look on her face when he suggested she mail him one of her daughter’s hairs.

For most of his professional life, Will has preferred working with women patients, who generally articulate their feelings more intelligently than men and whose emotional lives are more available to examination. But now it’s the male patients upon whom he depends for relief. No matter that their progress is slow, their insights infrequent. At least he doesn’t want to jump their bones. Three of his five new patients are men who have added their voices to what often strikes Will as the attenuated morality play of his work, a sprawling, incontinent production that could be titled “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Replete with crises and lacking a resolution, this drama energetically addresses anger, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, ignores vanity and pride (if he had to choose whether this reflects his particular moment in history or the nature of psychoanalysis, he’d go with the former), and showcases lust.

“I love her,” the guilt-riddled womanizer tells him. “I do love her. She thinks I can’t love her and screw other women, but she’s wrong. And it’s not like we don’t have great sex. Twenty years, and we’re still hot for each other.”

“So it isn’t a matter of turning to other women for what your wife won’t give you?”

“No, it’s a matter of . . . I don’t know what it’s a matter of. But in the moment, when I’m with a woman, any woman, it’s as if—this is preposterous, but at that moment I’m convinced that if I don’t have sex with whoever it is, I’ll never be able to get it up again. So, even though I’m aware that I’m sabotaging my marriage and maybe even my whole family, I can’t not do it. It’s compulsory, and not just from the point at which I’m in bed with whoever she is, but from the moment the idea of sex with that woman comes into my head. It’s like the old expression ‘Use it or lose it’ has turned into some kind of spell, or curse. I end up screwing all kinds of women I don’t even want to, when I don’t want to.”

He keeps talking even though he’s seen Will look at his watch. “I’ve tried other things—everything,” he says. “Acupuncture. Hypnosis. We’ve gone to couples therapy. Nothing works.”

“Use it or lose it?” Will asks. The hour’s up, but finally it seems as if they’re on to something.

The man nods. “I even hear it in my head,” he says. “Well, I hear a lot of things like that, phrases that get stuck in my head.”

“Tell me about them.”

The man shrugs self-consciously. “Some just bug me,” he says, “like that old ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.’ And the other one that always pops up when I walk outside. As soon as I see dog crap, I hear ‘Eat shit and die.’ Well, obviously I don’t act on that, but the words stay in my head. They play over and over until something, I don’t know what, distracts me or turns them off somehow. I can’t tell you how they stop because as long as I’m trying to turn them off, I can’t, you know? They have to stop when I’ve given up, when I’m not paying attention anymore.”

“Are there others of these directives?” Will asks. “Others you can remember?”

“Oh, yes, many of them. There’s ‘Haste makes waste’ and ‘A stitch in time’—things like that. ‘No pain, no gain.’ ”

“Sayings, you mean? Aphorisms?”

“Yes. But while most of them bother me by repeating over and over, the ‘Use it or lose it’ one forces me to act because the idea that it’s true, that I will lose it, is so powerful.”

“Do you avoid cracks in the sidewalk?”

“I guess I do, yes.”

“Do some of these directives occur more frequently than others?”

“No. At least I don’t think they do.”

“And mostly they stop when you obey?”

“Yes. I hadn’t spelled it out that way to myself, but you’re right.” Will makes a note. He’s allowed the new patient to use up not only the few remaining minutes of his hour—he’s never been one for forcing a fifty-minute break-off—but a little of the next patient’s as well, and she comes in glaring at him. It’s six minutes past.

“Maria,” he says, standing to greet her. “Please forgive me. The . . . the gentleman whose appointment was immediately before yours was describing a complicated set of circumstances. You know I don’t like to cut people off.”

She nods, looking slightly mollified. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“Please,” he says. He gestures toward the couch. “I was hoping that today, as I have a cancellation following your session, we could run overtime. If your schedule allows, that is.”

“Yeah, thanks, okay.” She hangs her coat in the closet but keeps her purse with her, lies down holding it in front of her crotch. Several times, she has pointed this habit out to Will, as if afraid he hasn’t picked up on this self-conscious Freudian allusion. He never takes the bait when she asks him what it might mean, just lobs the question back at her.

“I feel like you’re always watching me,” she says as soon as she’s comfortably settled.

“Yes, I remember. We were talking about that last week.”

“No matter what I’m doing—I can be at work or eating dinner or changing my clothes or even having sex, and I get this feeling that if I look up, you’ll be standing there. Not saying anything, just watching me. Making your silent judgments.” She uses her hands as she speaks and doesn’t return them to her purse during pauses but leaves them hanging in midair, above her chest. “Well,” she says, “don’t you have any response to that?”

“Yes,” Will says. “I’m wondering why you think I judge you.”

“Because you do. You sit there thinking how purposeless and stupid my life is.”

“Why do you imagine me thinking that?”

“Why wouldn’t you? After all, whatever I do or feel, I come here and tell you all about it. So you might just as well be there with me. Then you could see exactly how stupid and shallow I am.”

“Do you think you might like to have someone with you all the time? Someone to watch over you?”

“Why would I want that?”

“It’s not so unusual a wish. People get lonely.”

“I’d like to be lonely! I’d like to have a minute to myself. But you make it impossible for me to have any privacy even when I am alone. I told you, it’s uncomfortable. It’s not something I enjoy. It’s like I have a built-in peeping Tom.”

“But Maria, it’s you who’s invented this, the idea of my secretly watching you. And you who imagines that my observations are judgmental.”

“Omniscient,” she says.

“Omniscient?”

“Yes. Because you’re in my head, too, so you can see what I’m thinking.”

“Go on,” Will says when she falls silent. But she says nothing, and he finds himself feeling impatient. He looks past the couch to the dance studio across the street, through whose windows he sometimes watches the students, children mostly. Today it’s a group of little girls about the same age as Samantha, although he can make out a boy or two. Beginners’ ballet, he guesses, a lot of antic warming up followed by a halting review of the basics. The teacher, a young woman in black leotard and tights with red leg warmers, stands at the front of the class, holding a position until the three rows of would-be dancers have assembled their limbs in an approximation of her own. Then she goes painstakingly from one child to the next, nudging feet, realigning arms, a process that requires her to stoop and squat, patiently doing again and again what she must have done countless times before. From across the narrow street, Will can see her wide smiles of encouragement. Her energy and enthusiasm make him feel tired, even old. What—if anything—distinguishes his work from hers? Does he not spend hours each day nudging and straightening, supporting mostly doomed attempts to approach an ideal from various points of stubborn individuality? After each position, the teacher has the class jump up and down and shake their arms and legs, presumably in an effort to dispel energy and make them pliable enough to attempt the next.

“You’re just,” Maria blurts, “I don’t know. It’s what I said—as long as I’m going to tell you, you might just as well be there. In my bedroom.” She stops there, and Will is silent, waiting. “It feels the same as when I used to get in trouble and my mother would make me wait in my room until my dad got home,” she says.

“What does?”

“Your watching me.”

“How? How does it?”

“Because. It just does, that’s all.”

“Do you think perhaps you’re feeling angry with me and would like to punish me?” Will prompts, unusually direct, but over the past five years Maria has proved herself someone who can get stuck on a topic for weeks, marching the two of them over and over the same territory.

“Angry about what?”

“Well, I remember that you were upset with me last September, after I had been away during August. We spoke about your feeling abandoned.”

“But why would that make me want you to see into my private life? Stuff like with my boyfriend—stuff that’s intimate. I mean, why would I want you to see me naked or having sex?”

“Tell me if this sounds possible,” Will tries. “You’d like to believe that my life is boring, empty, and doesn’t include intimacies like those you share with your boyfriend.”

Maria lies still on the couch, says nothing.

“Wouldn’t it be that much more gratifying if I were to witness your interesting life? And know that my own was comparatively barren?”

She pulls her purse up, hugging it to her stomach. It’s one of the few times her handling it doesn’t strike him as premeditated. “I think”—she takes a deep breath, starts over. “I think maybe I want you to see me with my boyfriend so I can prove to you that I don’t have any . . . any of those feelings for you.”

Can it be true that all of Will’s patients are consumed by the topic of sex? Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex. Has he done this to them? Communicated his disease?

The last appointment of the day is an intake, a tall young woman, leggy like a teenager and decorated with what he’s come to regard as the usual assortment of tattoos. She sits sideways in the armchair, her back against one padded arm, her legs over the other. Two stainless steel studs connected by a post sit on either side of the pinch of flesh just above the bridge of her nose. Placed where they are, the little orbs disturb him as might a smaller, brighter pair of eyes between her own pale blue ones, themselves offset by owlishly smudged eyeliner and mascara. She’s attractive in a sulky, ill-kempt way, her hair falling unevenly around her face, appearing to have been hacked rather than styled. More likely, styled expensively to look as though hacked. As she talks she chews one of her nails, all of which are bitten to the quick, and armored with silver rings.

“So,” she says, “that’s it, I guess.”

“Where do you meet these men?”

“Bars mostly. Except the one I’m going to do next will be an art-history professor. So I’ll pick him up at the faculty house.”

“The faculty house?”

“Uh-huh. It’s my work-study gig. I waitress there.”

Will tries to picture the young woman in a waitress outfit along with the studs, tattoos, and smudged mascara. She doesn’t present herself as a person who would take orders politely. “That’s unusual financial aid, isn’t it?” he asks her.

“It would be, yeah. But it’s not financial aid, per se. See, there’s hardly any teaching slots in classics; there’s maybe five TA’s in the whole department, so if you’re a doctoral student, eventually you end up with these funky jobs. Quasi-official. The department secretary will hunt something down for you if you’re willing to, like, grovel and curry favor. Which is the definition of higher education, basically, at least as far as I can figure. I’ll maybe go into teaching if I ever get out of there. I wouldn’t need an education degree to get hired by a private school.” Speaking about her future, she looks earnest and sober, not the disaffected slacker who threw herself into the chair but a scholarly disciple whose postmodern finery might peel right off, like a Halloween costume, and reveal one of those laurel-wreathed heads from a Roman coin. “It’s not as impractical as it seems,” she adds. “Classics are cool again. They’re making a comeback.”

Will nods. “I guess that’s what makes them classics.”

She raises her eyebrows, and the two studs ascend slightly as well. “Precisely,” she says. Her expression suggests that she’s taken his comment to have been sarcastic, which it was not.

“Latin?” he asks. “Greek?”

“Latin and Greek. Latin all the way back to junior high. Greek I began as a freshman.”

Will leans back in his chair, hands behind his head, fingers laced. It’s a pose, at once relaxed and challenging. “Well,” he says. “What would you want from this process? From what you’ve told me, I assume you’re considering weekly therapy rather than analysis, which would be a considerable investment with respect to both time and money—analysis is three to five sessions a week. If we were to meet once weekly, our dialogue would still take a psychoanalytic approach, because that’s my training. We’d use dreams, fantasies, free association—whatever means by which we can access unconscious rather than conscious material. But one day a week would imply a distinct, comparatively short-term goal, rather than the less narrowly defined and, some would even say, spiritual quest of a true psychoanalysis. And, as I said, more affordable.”

“Spiritual how?”

“Spiritual as in the hope for enlightenment. About the self. The attempt to become a more fully conscious being.” She nods slowly, eyebrows raised in a skeptical expression.

“Was I, like, supposed to be answering a question?” she asks after a minute or more has gone by.

“I’m hoping we can figure out how to help you. And to that end, I was asking what you want to accomplish in here, talking with me.”

“To get over this bullshit, obviously. To escape from this, this, um, this thing, this whatever-it-is that makes me go after these old guys.”

“Old guys,” Will says, deciding to defer practical arrangements until the end of the hour. “Tell me what that’s like,” he says.

“What it’s like?”

“Yes. What does it feel like to seduce older men?”

She makes a face. “Well, first off, it’s not seducing.”

“No?”

“It’s collecting.”

“Collecting?” Will writes the word down.

“It’s more like that than it is like anything else. I mean, it’s . . . that’s the only way I can describe it.”

“How does it feel emotionally?”

“Emotionally? You mean . . .” She trails off, looking genuinely confused.

“I mean, are you happy? Sad? Satisfied when the date is over? Frustrated? Do you feel you’re courting danger? Overpowered, or do you feel you control the interaction?”

“They’re not dates. Dates presume, like, a future. These are just anonymous hookups with old guys.”

“Okay,” Will says. “Can you tell me how it feels to anonymously hook up with an old guy?”

The girl frowns in concentration, but it’s her thumbnail she’s working on, not his question. After a moment she looks up. “I feel like I’m collecting them.”

“All right. Then what does collecting feel like?”

“I don’t know, it’s . . . I guess I said ‘collecting’ because for me it’s the same as it was when I was a kid and I had this, like, thing for glass paperweights. There was always one I needed to have, and I’d be like—I couldn’t really think about anything else until I got it. So I’d babysit or go through garbage cans for soda bottles to, you know, get the nickel deposits, or I’d do chores. Whatever I had to do, to get the money together to pay for it. And then, when I got it, this dumb thing I’d been, like, frantic to have, I wouldn’t be so much satisfied as relieved. Because then I wouldn’t have to think about how I needed it anymore. I had it, so I could get on with other stuff.”

Will nods. “I’m still listening,” he says.

“That’s it. There isn’t any more.”

“Would it be fair to say that adding a paperweight to your collection made you feel as though it was in your power, rather than the other way around?”

The girl studies the freshly bitten thumbnail and returns it, briefly, to her mouth. “I guess,” she says.

“Did you enjoy them once you had them?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, did you spend time looking at them? Were there things to learn about them, like methods of manufacture? Different kinds of glass? Did you get into the history of the glass paperweight?”

She gives him a contemptuous, who’s-the-crazy-one-here look. “Nooo,” she says, drawing the word out. “I kept them on a shelf in my bookcase. I mean, they were pretty, but what can you do with a ball of glass? I wasn’t into, like, dusting.”

“So it was all about pursuing the object?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“And it’s the same with the older men?”

“Pretty much. I have sex with one, move on to the next.”

She falls silent under Will’s gaze. A low-necked pullover reveals the words tattooed on her chest to be Latin—at least he thinks that’s what they are—letters like those that adorn the entablatures of monuments and big civic buildings, U’s written as V’s—MVSEVM rather than MUSEUM. When she sees his eye hesitate on the tattoo she pulls at the neck of her sweater to reveal another line of text under the first.

“‘Quo usque tandem abutere patientia mea, ’ ” she reads. “It’s from Cicero’s first oration against Catiline. Except I edited out the name Catiline and used mea instead of nostra.” She gets up to dig something out of her pocket, then returns to the same position, legs flung over one chair arm.

“What does it mean?”

“‘How long, pray, will you take advantage of my patience?’ ”

Will smiles. He likes this girl. “Is Cicero one of your heroes?” he asks as she unwraps a hard candy. A shred of cellophane sticks to its surface, and she tries to pick it off as best she can without fingernails.

“One of my heroes? Do people even have, like, heroes anymore?”

She puts her feet on the floor and sits up straight, shoulders back, chest out. “The culture is posthero,” she intones in a low, stentorian rumble, her expression dour and condescending. “Media-saturated, brand-conscious, inclined to mock every virtue from courage to modesty. Posthero and pro-rich-and-famous, heroism representing no more than a few coordinates along the arc of celebrity: conferred, questioned, doubted, debunked.”

Watching her performance, Will has to suppress his enjoyment of what seems an effortless caricature. “Skip hero,” he says. “Is Cicero a historical figure you admire?”

“I guess.”

Will leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. “What about the man?” he asks.

“What about him?”

“I’m wondering if both of you expect the same outcome. Does he—whoever he is—know it’s going to be a one-night stand?”

“What else could it be? It’s not like we know each other. It’s not like we’ve ever met before.” When Will doesn’t speak, she goes on. “Usually it seems pretty, you know, equal. They talk about what they do, their jobs. Or they say what they think they have to, what’s required by the, the . . . well, the situation makes them feel like they should flatter me, I guess, tell me I have a great ass or they like my hair or my eyes. Whatever. It doesn’t mean anything. Compliments are just, whatever, something to say while we’re checking each other out and deciding, like, what’s it gonna be, hook or book.” Will raises his eyebrows. “Meaning,” she says, “are we hooking up or booking, as in, like, leaving.” Again she sits up straight. “Book,” she intones, “verb, intransitive, to leave hurriedly as if tardy for a meeting of critical importance.” Too bad she didn’t choose drama over classics, Will thinks, take the opportunity to act out onstage. “It’s not about feelings,” she tells him. “It’s not about how I feel or how he feels.”

“What is it about?”

“Nothing. It isn’t about anything.” Her expression is one of exasperation. “You’ve heard the expression ‘operate on a need-to-know basis’?”

Will nods.

“Generally speaking, I operate on a need-not-to-know basis. So it’s not that I don’t need to know about how they feel—I need not to know. Get it?”

“If it’s not about feelings, what is it about?”

“God, is this what it’s like having your head shrunk? You have to answer the same questions over and over? I told you, collecting. I collect them.”

Will smiles in a way that’s meant to be disarming. He’s usually pretty quick to get a fix on a new patient, but there’s something about this girl that he can’t quite pin; she’s guarded in a way he can almost feel, as if she’s sitting on the other side of a pane of glass. “This is what’s called an intake session,” he tells her. “We haven’t even begun the shrinking yet.”

“Intake?”

“I ask questions to help me understand why you’ve come to me, and, if we decide to work together, to help me establish a treatment plan.”

“If we decide to work together?”

“Yes. Because it is work, and not only for me. Once we begin, you do most of the talking.” She looks at him. “Let’s go back to the men,” Will says. “Once you’ve picked one out, then what?”

“You know. We go someplace. His place. If he’s single. Or a friend’s place—that’s happened. Hotel, maybe. But I’m . . . I don’t do, like, cars.”

Will removes his glasses, cleans their lenses with a handkerchief, replaces them on his nose: a little act to diffuse whatever tension might proceed from his watching her talk.

“So we, uh, you know. I take my clothes off, and I’m, like, probably the youngest person they’ve had sex with for a while, a long time maybe, and they’re, well, they’re excited. I mean, you know, my boobs are still where they’re supposed to be. I’ve never been pregnant or anything that would make me, you know, stretched out or whatever. I’ve never lost or gained a bunch of weight.” Having offered the kind of material that takes some patients years to approach, the girl looks directly at Will. “I don’t know why, but they kind of turn me on, too. There’s this, this aspect to their bodies—like they’re not trying so hard, you know? They’re not these gym rats lifting weights in the mirror. I guess that in the same way my being young makes them hot, I like that they’re older. If they have a little gray hair on their chests, that helps. Chub around the middle, not so much muscle, whatever. It seems weird, even to me, but I do like it. Also, I gotta say, they’re better at fucking.”

Will remains expressionless and deploys one of his hard-on inhibitors, a picture his father took of a broken fire escape hung with icicles. He doesn’t know why—it’s not as if the photograph saddens or disgusts him—but it’s usually effective.

“They have, well, what they have is technique. Experience. Maybe it’s just that they aren’t impatient. They last longer—too long sometimes, but that’s better than having it end before it begins. Guys my age, for them sex isn’t any different from, I don’t know, takeout. They’re, like, frantic, hardly bother to unwrap me. Older guys, they take their time, pay attention to what’s going on. Ask—beg—to go down on me. They are, no kidding, total, I mean total, carpet munchers. I mean, like, all of them.” Will stops writing. He puts his elbows on his desk, fingers together, tip to tip, looks at her. She’s disclosing frank sexual material to distract him from her emotional absence. Either that or she’s trying to bait him.

“I’ve done thirty-seven,” she says after another leisurely examination of her bleeding thumbnail. “Thirty-seven so far. I have one picked out for Friday.”

“I thought you said you were determined to quit.”

She snorts. “Quit? Like with cigarettes?”

“Maybe like with cigarettes. Or any other addiction.”

The girl shoots him a look. “Did I, like, miss something here? Did anything happen that might make it easier, or even possible, for me to, what, abstain by Friday?”

Will puts down his pen, folds his hands on his blotter. “For some patients, those who can be honest with themselves and commit to change, the process of articulating that they have a problem and identifying the behavior they want to stop is enough to begin to change.”

“Would that be me, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered if you were actively struggling to quit.”

“This is my ‘active struggle.’ You. A shrink.”

“Yes,” he says, picking up his pen. “Perhaps together we’ll figure out what it is you get from these experiences with older men, so that you can discover a different source for whatever it gives you. A source you can live with, satisfy more easily. And less expensively.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not like I’m paying for anything.”

“I was referring to the psychic cost.”

The girl returns the problematic thumb to her mouth.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” he asks her.

“They’re kind of numb, actually.” She puts her feet on the floor and leans forward, holding her hands out. A fresh line of blood has formed at the thumb’s tip, and other fingers are bitten to the point of injury, as well. What’s left of her nails is surrounded by flesh so enflamed that it puffs up around the nail beds. “Pretty, huh?” she says. Looking at her hands, Will feels a strange leap of sexual excitement, as if he’s not just imagining but feeling the heat of those fingers on him, and he has to stop himself from reaching out to touch them.

He has to get her out of there.

“I’ve gotten these infections,” she says. “Paronychia. From the Greek. Para—beside, nychia—nail. Like, really excruciating. You can’t imagine. I had to go on antibiotics.”

“Have you tried to stop?” He has an erection. It’s instant, not the kind of excitement he can dampen. One second nothing, then, presto, all he’s thinking is: the next in her collection of old guys.

“Bunch of times. Nothing works. I’ve used that bitter stuff that tastes, like, bad enough to make you puke, but I bit them anyway. Tried keeping gloves on all the time, and chewed through them. Behavior mod, where every time I went after a nail I was supposed to snap myself with this, um, punishment thing—this strap around my wrist like a big rubber band—snap it really hard, so it hurt, but no. All three at once, still no good.” She shrugs. “Another problem to work on.”

Will looks at his watch.

“Okay,” she says, quick to pick up on the visual cue. “Same time next week?”

“If you’re interested in continuing.”

“I guess. I mean, can I just see how it goes?” She stands and pulls on her coat, picks up her backpack. “What about the fee?” she asks. “Do you . . . I read on your policy sheet that you have a, like, sliding fee scale. That for students it can be adjusted, um, down.” She settles her backpack into place by flexing and quickly straightening her knees to give it a little bounce. “Because my insurance is student health, and it doesn’t cover psychotherapy outside of the university. I’m entitled to ten sessions a year from student mental health, no charge. After that, it’s, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five an hour. But the therapists are dorks. I mean, worse than. Useless.”

“How much can you afford?” Will asks.

“You’re asking me what the bill is?” She tips her head to one side and frowns. Her puzzlement makes her look much younger, almost like a child.

“Yes,” he says.

“Uh. Could it be . . . how about, um, like, fifty? Forty?”

“All right,” he agrees. She digs her right hand into her pocket.

“Here,” she says. She puts two twenty-dollar bills on the blotter. He doesn’t touch them.

“It’s customary to pay with a check,” he says. “I send you a monthly statement, you mail me a check.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sort of between apartments right now, trying to simplify the whole mail thing. I don’t, like, have a forwarding address. Not yet.”

Will nods. “All right,” he says.

This is the moment when, ordinarily, he would stand and extend his hand to shake hers, but he can’t. He doesn’t have to look down to know that this isn’t the kind of hard-on he can hide with a notebook, at least not subtly enough to risk it. He leans forward, hands folded on his desk, trying to appear as if this is his usual manner of concluding a session. “Next week?” he says.

She steps a few feet back from his desk, her hands shoved in the pockets of her brown suede coat. Around each is a dark ring of what appears to be grease, as if she were in the habit of keeping French fries in her pockets. The stained coat; the unkempt hair; the bitten fingernails; the soles of her boots, past repair: all these conspire to make her look like an orphan, a girl who has been not so much brought up as “dragged up,” to use a favorite expression of his mother’s. Hers is an unexpectedly sexy squalor, though; it makes her seem as if she’s not so particular that she wouldn’t be game for . . . well, for almost anything.

“Next week?” he asks again as she’s walking toward the door.

“Okay,” she says without turning.