You love your wife and daughter, don’t you?” said Dr. Chin.
Kenneth hesitated. “Well, yes.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest you don’t,” Chin gently added. “I’m just trying to establish what are the things you truly care about.”
It was five o’clock on a Friday and Kenneth was back at West Tenth Street, sitting on the sofa, a pair of cold hands in his lap.
“I do love my family,” he said. “I’m not always the best husband or father. But I try.”
“You do things for them? You do things with them?”
“Absolutely. Yes, well, I’m not the chief breadwinner anymore. Gretchen’s law work brings in a bit more than I make. And Rosalind is at an age where she no longer wants to do half the things we used to do together: go to movies or shoot hoops at the gym or even play chess. Her friends told her girls don’t play chess.” Yet he was never as good a father as he wanted to be. “But I’m hardly one of those art or theater types who has no other life. How does the Yeats poem go? ‘Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of’? That’s not me. No. I love the real things.”
“William Butler Yeats?” said Chin. As if there might be another.
“Yes. From ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion.’ A major poem. It’s the one with the line about ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’”
Chin looked disturbed, puzzled, amused. Then she went back to her notes. “You and your wife have been married—fifteen years?”
“Yes. I love her, I trust her, I listen to her.” He hoped Chin wouldn’t ask about their sex life. “I mean, it was Gretchen who convinced me to continue seeing you when I wanted to stop.”
Chin looked up. “You wanted to terminate our sessions?”
“Uh, yes.” He hadn’t intended to tell Chin that.
She appeared concerned.
“Because you said some things last week that made me feel you weren’t the right therapist for me.”
“Which were?”
He moistened his lips. “You said you hate theater. That you have a phobia about it.”
“I can’t believe I said ‘phobia.’ That’s a clinical word, Kenneth. Not one I use lightly.”
“You said you were embarrassed about seeing actors onstage.”
“Oh that.” She shrugged, as if it were perfectly natural.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Chin. But it struck me as a confession of weakness. It undermined your authority.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “You see me as an authority figure?”
The question threw him. “You’re my therapist,” he said. “You must have some authority.”
“You believe in authority figures, Kenneth.”
“When it’s earned. When it’s deserved.”
“You see yourself as an authority figure?”
“Not really,” he claimed. What were they doing here?
“But you’re an important critic.”
“Only because I write for the Times. As I said last week. I’m nobody as an individual.”
“That’s like me saying that I’m nobody except for my certification as a psychiatrist.”
He wondered what kind of certification she actually had.
“I’m an employee,” he insisted. “Only an employee. Nothing more. Tonight, for example, I have to interview an actor. It’ll be after dinner when I’d rather be at home with my wife and daughter. And I’m not a reporter, I’m a reviewer. But they give the commands and I obey. Like a good dog.”
“And you resent that?”
“Not at all. I’m glad of it. Because it keeps me humble. It reminds me who I really am. It keeps me real.”
Chin sat back, her mouth knotted in a skeptical rosebud. Had he said something particularly absurd?
“So?” she said. “Do you want us to continue? Or shall I recommend a new therapist?”
He was startled. “Because I feel your authority is compromised?”
She shrugged. “You’ll feel that way about any therapist. Because you have authority issues. But if you want to try someone else, I don’t mind.”
Was she rejecting him? She wanted to get rid of him? Why?
“It’s not about you,” he insisted. “It’s me. It’s my problem.” He laughed to signal he was making a joke. “I want you to be perfect.”
“I’m not,” she said.
She said it so flatly that he didn’t know what to say for a moment. Then: “Maybe I should continue? For a little longer? We barely know each other, do we?”
She took her legal pad back into her lap and wrote something. “Good. I was hoping you’d stay. It could be a very interesting experience for us both.”
She spoke as if keeping him were a challenge, a complication that she’d rather not have. Was he really so difficult?
“Let me toss out a few ideas regarding you and authority,” she proposed. “You want to have power, but not be hated. You want to be king, but treated like an equal. You want to be loved but not loved too much.”
Kenneth regretted that he hadn’t taken the chance to escape.
“Have you ever considered quitting your job at the Times?”
The question took him completely by surprise. “What? And give up show business?” he said.
He waited for her to recognize the antique punch line of the ancient joke and laugh, but she gave it only a pained smile.
“You haven’t mentioned your parents yet,” she said. “Is your mother still alive?”