The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  Ricky swallowed hard. “Nothing of that sort ever took place.”

  “Well,” Soloman said abruptly, “it’s not me that you’re going to have to convince, is it?”

  Ricky paused before asking, “How long has this patient been seeing you?”

  “Six months. We’ve got a helluva long way to go, too.”

  “Who referred her?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Who referred her to you?”

  “I don’t know that I recall . . .”

  “You mean to tell me that a woman suffering this sort of emotional trauma simply picked your name out of a phone book?”

  “I’d have to check my notes.”

  “Your recollection should be sufficient.”

  “I’d still have to check my notes.”

  Ricky snorted. “You’ll find that no one referred her. She chose you for some obvious reason. So, I ask again: Why you, doctor?”

  Soloman paused, thinking. “I have a reputation in this city for success with victims of sex crimes.”

  “What do you mean reputation?”

  “I’ve had some articles written about my work in the local press.”

  Ricky was thinking quickly. “Do you often testify in court?”

  “Not that often. But I am familiar with the process.”

  “How often is not often?”

  “Two or three times. And I know where you’re going with this. Yes, they have been high-profile cases.”

  “Have you ever been an expert witness?”

  “Why, yes. In several civil suits, including one against a psychiatrist accused of much the same thing you are. I have a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, as well, where I lecture on various recovery profiles from criminal acts . . .”

  “Was your name in the paper shortly before this patient approached you? Prominently?”

  “Yes. A feature article in the Boston Globe. But I don’t see why . . .”

  “And you insist your patient is credible?”

  “I do. I have been in therapy with her now for six months. Two sessions each week. She has been utterly consistent. Nothing she has said up to this point would make me doubt her word in the slightest. Doctor, you and I both know how close to impossible it is for someone to successfully lie to a therapist, especially over an elongated space of time.”

  Ricky would have undoubtedly agreed with this statement a few days earlier. Now he was no longer quite so certain. “And where is she now?”

  “She is on vacation until the third week in August.”

  “Did she happen to give you a phone number where she could be reached during August?”

  “No. I don’t believe so. We merely made an appointment for shortly before Labor Day and left it at that.”

  Ricky thought hard, then asked another question. “And does she have striking, extraordinary, penetrating green eyes?”

  Soloman paused. When he spoke, it was with an icy reserve. “So, you do know her then?”

  “No,” Ricky said. “I was just guessing.”

  Then he hung up the phone. Virgil, he said to himself.

  Ricky found himself staring across his office toward the painting on the wall that had figured so prominently in the false recollections of the phony patient up in Boston. There was no doubt in his mind that Dr. Soloman was real, and that he had been selected with care. There was equally no doubt, Ricky understood, that this so beautiful and so troubled young woman who had come to seek out the well-known Dr. Soloman’s care would ever be seen by him again. At least not in the context that Soloman thought. Ricky shook his head. There were more than a few therapists whose conceits were so profound that they came to love the attention of the press and the devotion of their patients. They behaved as if they had some unique and altogether magical insight into the ways of the world and the workings of people, dashing off opinions and pronouncements with slipshod regularity. Ricky suspected that Soloman was closer in stripe to one of these talk-show shrinks, who embraced the image of knowledge without the actual hard work of gaining insight. It is much easier to listen to someone briefly and fly off the cuff, than it is to sit day after day, penetrating layers of the mundane and trivial in pursuit of the profound. He had nothing but contempt for the members of his profession who lent their names to opinions in courtrooms and articles in newspapers.

  But, Ricky thought, the problem was, Soloman’s reputation, notoriety, and public persona would lend credence to the allegation. By fixing him on the bottom of that letter, it gained a weight that would survive just long enough for the purposes of the person who’d designed it.

  Ricky asked himself: What did you learn today?

  Much, he answered. But mostly that the strands of the web he found himself entangled in had been laid in place months earlier.

  He looked back at the painting gracing the wall. They were here, he thought, long before the other day. His eyes cruised around the office. Nothing here was safe. Nothing here was private. They were here months ago, and I didn’t know it.

  Rage like a blow to the stomach staggered him, and his first response was to rise, stride across the office, and seize the small woodcut that the doctor from Boston had mentioned, ripping it from its hook on the wall. He took the painting and dashed it into the wastebasket by his desk, cracking the frame and shattering the glass. The sound was like a gunshot echoing in the small office space. Obscenities burst from his lips, uncharacteristic and rough, filling the air with needles. He turned and grasped the sides of his desk, as if to steady himself.

  As quickly as it arrived, the anger fled, replaced by another wave of nausea which slithered through him. He felt dizzy, his head reeling, the sensation one gets when one stands up too quickly, especially with a case of the flu or a severe cold. Ricky stumbled emotionally. His breathing was tight, wheezy, and one felt as if someone had looped a rope around his chest, making it hard to breathe.

  It took him several minutes to regain equilibrium, and, even when he did, he still felt weak, almost exhausted.

  He continued to look around the office, but now it seemed different. It was as if all the items that decorated his life had been rendered sinister. He thought he could no longer trust anything in his sight. He wondered what else Virgil had described to the physician in Boston; what other details of his life were now on display in a complaint filed with the state board of medical ethics. He remembered times patients of his had come in distraught following a break-in or a mugging and spoken about the violation, how unsettled it made their lives. He had listened to these complaints sympathetically, with clinical detachment, but never really understanding how primal the sensation was. He had a better idea now, he told himself.

  He, too, felt robbed.

  Again he looked around the room. What had once seemed to him to be safe was swiftly losing that quality.

  Making a lie seem real is tricky work, he thought to himself. It takes planning.

  Ricky maneuvered behind his desk and saw that the red light on his answering machine was blinking steadily. A message counter was lit up, as well, also red, with the number four. He reached down and pressed the switch that would activate the machine, listening to the first of the messages. He immediately recognized the voice of a patient, a late-middle-aged journalist at the New York Times, a man stuck in a well-paying but fundamentally repetitive job editing stories for the science section written by younger, more energetic reporters. He was a man who longed to do more with his life, to investigate creativity and originality, but was afraid of the disruption this indulgence might bring to a carefully regimented life. Still, this patient was intelligent, sophisticated, and making significant strides in therapy, beginning to understand the connection between his rigid upbringing in the Midwest, child of dedicated academics, and his fear of adventure. Ricky quite liked the man, and thought he was a likely candidate to complete his analysis and see the freedom it would give him as an opportunity, which is a great satisfaction to any ther
apist.

  “Doctor Starks,” the man said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he identified himself. “I apologize for leaving a message on your machine during your vacation. I don’t mean to disrupt your holiday, but this morning’s mail brought a very disturbing letter.”

  Ricky inhaled sharply. The voice of the patient continued slowly.

  “The letter was a copy of a complaint filed against you with the state medical ethics board and the New York Psychoanalytic Society. I recognize the anonymous nature of the allegation makes it extremely hard to counter. The copy of the letter, incidentally, was mailed to me at my home, not my office, and lacked any return address or any other identifying characteristics.”

  Again the patient hesitated.

  “I have been placed in a substantial conflict of interest. There is little doubt in my mind that the complaint is a worthy news story, and should be turned over to someone on our city reporting staff for additional investigation. On the other hand, this act would obviously severely compromise our relationship. I am troubled deeply by the allegations, which I presume you deny. . . .”

  The patient seemed to catch his breath, then added with a touch of bitter anger, “. . . Everyone always denies wrongdoing. ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it . . . ‘ Until they’re so caught by events and trapped by circumstances that they can no longer lie. Presidents. Government officials. Businessmen. Doctors. Scoutmasters and Little League coaches, for Christ’s sake. Then they finally are forced to tell the truth and expect everyone to understand they had to lie, earlier, as if it’s okay to keep lying until you’re so goddamn caught you can’t lie effectively anymore. . . .”

  The patient paused again, then hung up the phone. The message seemed sliced off, short of what he wanted Ricky to respond to.

  Ricky’s hand shook slightly as he again pressed the Play button on the machine. The next message was merely a woman sobbing. Unfortunately, he recognized the noise, and knew it was another longtime patient. She, too, he guessed, had received a copy of the letter. He quickly fast-forwarded the tape. The two remaining messages were also from patients. One, a prominent choreographer for Broadway productions, sputtered with barely repressed rage. The other, a portrait photographer of some note, seemed as much confused as she was distraught.

  Despair flooded him. Perhaps for the first time in his professional life, he didn’t know what to say to his own patients. The others who hadn’t yet called, he suspected, hadn’t opened their mail yet.

  One of the key elements to psychoanalysis is the curious relationship between the patient and the therapist, where the patient pours out every intimate detail of his life to a person who doesn’t reciprocate and very rarely reacts to even the most provocative information. In the child’s game Truth or Dare, trust is established by shared risk. You tell me, I’ll tell you. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Psychoanalysis skews this relationship by making it utterly one-sided. Indeed, Ricky knew, the patients’ fascination with who Ricky was, what he thought and felt, how he reacted, were all dynamics of significance and were all part of the great process of transference that took place in his office, where sitting silently behind his patients’ heads as they lay with their feet in the air on the couch, he symbolically became many things, but mostly, he came to symbolize to each of them something different and something troubling, and so, by taking on these different roles for each patient he could lead each of them through their problems. His silence would come to psychologically mimic one patient’s mother, another’s father, a third’s boss. His silence would come to represent love and hate, anger and sadness. It could become loss, it could become rejection. In some respects, he understood, the analyst is a chameleon, changing color against the surface of every object he touches.

  He didn’t return any of the phone calls from his patients, and, by evening, all had called. The editor from the Times was right, he thought. We live in a society that has reformed the entire concept of the denial. Now the denial carries with it the presumption that it is merely a lie of convenience, to be recalled and subsequently tailored at some later point, when an acceptable truth has been negotiated.

  Hours every day that totaled weeks that became months and turned into years with each of the patients had been savaged by a single well-constructed lie. He didn’t know how to respond to his patients, whether he should respond at all. The clinician within him understood that examining each patient’s response to the allegations would be fruitful, but at the same time, that seemed ineffectual.

  For dinner that evening he made himself chicken soup out of a can.

  Spooning the scalding mixture into his mouth, he wondered whether some of the famed medicinal and restorative powers of the concoction would flow into his heart.

  He understood that he was still lacking a plan of action. Some chart that he could follow. A diagnosis, followed by a course of treatment. Up to this point, Rumplestiltskin seemed to Ricky to be like some sort of insidious cancer, attacking different parts of his persona. He still needed to define an approach. The problem was, this went against his training. Had he been an oncologist, like the men who’d unsuccessfully treated his wife, or even a dentist who was able to see the decayed tooth and pluck it out, he would have done so. But Ricky’s training was far different. An analyst, although recognizing certain definable characteristics and syndromes, ultimately lets the patient invent the treatment, within the simple context of the process. Ricky was being crippled in his approach to Rumplestiltskin and his threats by the very nature that had stood him in such fine stead over so many years. The passivity that was a hallmark of his profession was suddenly dangerous.

  He worried for the first time late that night that it might kill him.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning, he crossed another day off Rumplestiltskin’s calendar and composed the following inquiry:

  Searching high and looking fast,

  inspecting all from twenty past.

  Is this year right or wrong?

  (Because of time, I have not long.)

  And although it seems like such a bother,

  am I hunting for R’s mother?

  Ricky realized that he was stretching Rumplestiltskin’s rules, first by asking two questions instead of one, and not exactly framing them for a simple yes or no response as he’d been instructed. But he guessed that by using the same nursery school rhyme scheme that his tormentor did, Rumplestiltskin would be prompted to ignore the violation of the rules and might answer with slightly more detail. Ricky understood that in order to deduce who had ensnared him, he needed information. Much more information. He was under no illusion that Rumplestiltskin would give away some telltale bit of detail that would tell Ricky precisely where to look for him, or might actually instantly provide an avenue for a name, that could then be given to the authorities—if Ricky could figure out which authorities to contact. The man had planned out his adventure in revenge too precisely for that to happen quickly, Ricky thought. But an analyst is considered a scientist of the oblique and of the hidden. He should be expert at the hidden and concealed, Ricky thought, and if he was to find the answer to Rumplestiltskin’s real name, it would have to come from a slip that the man, no matter how intricately he had schemed, did not anticipate.

  The lady at the Times who took the order for the single-column front-page ad seemed intrigued in a pleasant way by the rhyme. “This is unusual,” she said lightly. “Usually these are just happy fiftieth anniversary mom and dad ads, or else come-ons for some new product that someone wants to sell,” she said. “This seems different. What’s the occasion?” she asked.

  Ricky, trying to be polite, replied with an efficient lie, “It’s part of an elaborate scavenger hunt. Just a summertime diversion for a couple of us who enjoy puzzles and word games.”

  “Oh,” the woman replied. “That sounds like fun.”

  Ricky didn’t respond to this, because there was little of fun in what he was doing. The woman at the newspaper re
ad the rhyme back to him one last time to make certain she had the wording correctly, then took down the necessary billing information. She asked whether he wanted to be billed directly, or to put the charge on a credit card. He elected for the credit card response. He could hear her fingers clicking the computer keyboard as he read off his Visa number.

  “Well,” the ad lady said, “that’s it, then. The ad will run tomorrow. Good luck with your game,” she added. “I hope you win.”

  “So do I,” he said. He thanked her and hung up the phone. He turned back to the piles of notes and records.

  Narrow and eliminate, he thought. Be systematic and careful.

  Rule out men or rule out women. Rule out the old, focus on the young. Find the right time sequence. Find the right relationship. That will get a name. One name will lead to another.

  Ricky breathed hard. He had spent his life trying to help people understand the emotional forces that caused things to happen to them. What an analyst does is isolate blame and try to render it into something manageable, because an analyst would think of the need for revenge to be as crippling a neurosis as anyone could suffer. The analyst would want the patient to find a way past that need and beyond that anger. It wasn’t uncommon for a patient to start a therapy stating a fury that seemed to demand an acting-out response. The treatment was designed to eliminate that urge, so that they could get on with their life unencumbered by the compulsive need to get even.

  Getting even, in his world, was a weakness. Perhaps even a sickness.

  Ricky shook his head.

  As his head spun, trying to sort through what he knew and how to apply it to his situation, the telephone on the desk rang. It startled him, and he hesitated, reaching out for it, wondering whether it would be Virgil.

  It was not. It was the ad lady at the Times.

  “Doctor Starks?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to call you back, but we had a little problem.”