Confidential(16)

“Doesn’t she have a husband or family?” I couldn’t help it; I was impatient, too. This didn’t seem like a normal thing for a therapist to do, sitting with his client in the ER for what could be hours. And it was a her, wasn’t it? He hadn’t said that, hadn’t used a pronoun, but other than in couples therapy, he didn’t seem to have male clients. Or if he did, he didn’t find them worth discussing, which was telling.

“I need to go.” Then in a whispered hiss, “She’s suicidal. Have some compassion.” Click. He was gone. Back to her.

I hated how I felt right then. Petty and small. Abandoned. He was right; I should have had compassion for this nameless, faceless woman who wanted to die.

Or she was just pretending so she could get a few hours with Michael in the ER. He had that effect on women.

He’d told me his dating history had been full of women who’d misconstrued kindness, who’d held on too long with grasping fingers, and that he’d learned over the years that it was better to amputate. Don’t give false hope. Be direct.

Was I the one with the grasping fingers now?

No, if he didn’t want to be with me, he’d tell me directly.

There was no need for insecurity because I knew how Michael felt about me. But it had been creeping up lately. I wanted to meet his parents and his friends. I wanted legitimacy. Then I’d feel permanent. At that moment, I felt so insubstantial. Replaceable.

He said I was the only client he’d ever had true romantic feelings for. “But you must have been attracted to other clients,” I said. “You’re a guy. You must have wanted to have sex with some of them.”

“That’s normal. It’s called countertransference.”

It was getting increasingly difficult to take his reassurances at face value. I wanted them to be backed up with actions, and though it had been more than a month since our “anniversary,” I was still in the shadows. We’d gone nowhere. Trips to his house remained infrequent, because he still didn’t want the neighbors to catch sight of me. The vast majority of the time, it was still takeout dinners and sex in my apartment. Tonight, it wouldn’t even be that, because he was with some other woman.

A client, I reminded myself. Suicidal threats were not foreplay. This was work. He was a responsible therapist and a caring human. I wouldn’t want him to be less, would I?

Needing to get out of my head, I picked up my phone.

“Cousin!” Kate—Katerina—exclaimed. No mixed messages there; she was always glad to hear from me.

We grew up together in Miami, her trailing at my heels along the beach. A three-year age difference felt significant in childhood, and my head start in life meant that she was perpetually looking up to me. But I became a self-involved teenager, and she spiraled downward. All the drugs and all the men, some of them twice her age, because they were the ones providing the drugs. It was a dark time in our family, and I wanted to be the one to pull her out, back into the light, but I couldn’t. She had to do that herself, and she did, finally, after her fourth stint in rehab. She’d been clean for several years now, and while the family was still wary of her, keeping her in black-sheep status, she and I had a loyalty, a bond, that was unbreakable. I trusted her completely, which was why she was the only one who’d known about Michael since the beginning.

“How’s everyone?” I asked. Mostly, I meant my parents. Kate kept an eye on them for me, since I was across the country. They didn’t have any particular health problems, but they were in their seventies, and I was their only child. The distance was hard on them. We spoke weekly, staccato exchanges of information, my fielding their yes-or-no questions. They would make terrible therapists.

“We all miss you, of course.” Kate had never lived in Russia, but she had a faint accent. That’s because her parents were the family members who had assimilated least. In her house, it was always Moscow: Russian food, tapestries, language. “Your parents are after me to visit you. Then I can give them the skinny.”

I laughed. “Tell them there’s no skinny. I’m fine. I’m great.”

“You know they don’t believe that.”

They’d remained in a chronic state of worry ever since Young and I separated. Initially, they tried to convince me to patch things up, whatever it took. I told them I could survive on my own; I make decent money, and the divorce settlement was fair. Still, they’d gone into deeper mourning for my marriage than I had. For a time, Kate said it had been like they were sitting Shiva, always in black. They hadn’t even liked Young that much; they just really liked marriage. They thought it was the only true safety net, and now, in their minds, I was adrift.

“What do I need to do?” I asked. “Show them my bank account records? A smiley Instagram account?”

“You know the only thing that’ll satisfy them is if you move back to Miami, find a nice man, marry him, and have babies.”

“They think nothing’s keeping me here.”

“Tell them otherwise. Tell them about Michael. Say he’s a rich, successful therapist. A Jewish therapist.”

We both laughed. “You think I can get him to convert before he meets them?”

“At the pace he’s going, yeah, I think you have the time.”

I didn’t laugh.

“How is Michael?” she said.