Jenny Oughton gestured to the sofa. He sat beside her in a chair. He realized Jenny Oughton was focusing on him and forced himself to assume a less alarmed expression. She seemed quite young to be a doctor, though increasingly everyone seemed younger: gas station attendants; airplane pilots. So: he had apparently met her once before, a face smiling as he came into the house after his night class, while Sonja’s book discussion group was still meeting. “I know he’s a very good friend of yours,” she said now, her hand on his wrist. “I’m very sorry.”
He had arrived at the point where he’d decided not to question this repeatedly. Also, although the assertion continued to perplex him, it didn’t seem the time to disclaim any feelings for McCallum.
“But I assume since you’re here, he must be your friend, too.”
She smiled. “When I was still practicing, he was my client.”
“Client?”
“In the old days ‘patient’ was the term, I believe.”
There was something he could identify with; her sense of irony, though in her case she was obviously using it to put him at ease.
“Well, that’s amazing, because when I suggested he and I”—he faltered—“I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t mention, your name, and he agreed to consult with you, but he never said he knew you. I mean, that would have been bizarre. If we’d walked in and he’d been your former patient.”
What did that quixotic smile mean? That he was somehow the odd man out in this situation, that there might be no end to the number of things she might fill him in on?
“You had been coming alone that day, I thought.”
“I guess I had been coming alone,” he said. “It seemed …” What had it seemed? What had that whole tedious episode with Livan Baker been about when obviously the real threat to McCallum had been his own crazy wife? “He didn’t tell me he knew you,” he said simply.
“Well,” she said, just as simply, “if you didn’t use my name, I suppose he didn’t know it was me you’d be seeing.”
“Yes, but I don’t see why he didn’t just call you about this problem to begin with.”
“We terminated a couple of years ago. He was seeing one of the M.D.’s about the medication he was taking.”
“Forgive me,” he said, “but he didn’t give me the impression he knew anyone at student health, except that he knew of someone who had apparently upset a student who had certain … who believed, rightly or wrongly, that McCallum had done certain things to her. I thought that student needed help, but the therapist had, well, the therapist had apparently not been the picture of compassion when… ”
That smile again, but slighter. “I know the situation you’re referring to,” she said. “I’m aware of the determination regarding the therapeutic approach.”
“Therapeutic approach?”
“Yes,” Jenny Oughton said. “The student came for therapy.”
“I know she came, went, for therapy, but are you aware that she was extremely upset following her first session and that she didn’t return?”
“I did hear she didn’t return. Yes,” she said.
“Am I missing something here?”
“I don’t think you’re missing anything, per se.” She looked at him, no smile. “I understand your confusion,” she said. “I should add that I found myself with a conflict of interest when I was called in to consult. I no longer see clients privately, but I was called in as someone the therapist thought might offer some insight. I realized, then, that the client being discussed was describing a problem she felt had been caused by my former client. That might not have been definitive, in terms of my bowing out, except that more recently, Susan McCallum had been to see me. Susan McCallum was in treatment with someone else. Because of my going into research.” The smile, again. “I’d appreciate your keeping confidential my mention of Susan McCallum as a client. The situation was naturally very puzzling to you, so I told you.”
“Puzzling. Yes. Well. It was puzzling, yes,” he echoed. He was deliberately stalling for time, yet he wasn’t sure what might ideally happen: she might suddenly tell him everything about everyone, including, through her always infallible, omniscient view, what was true and what was a lie? Not a chance — and quite possibly, she didn’t know. She might give him, at the very least, some clue as to why, by implication, the puzzle had been in large part resolved by what she’d said? Did she think he saw things more clearly after what she’d told him? Had McCallum, in effect, set him up, knowing full well that it was not in his best interests that Livan Baker’s problem be analyzed at student health?
He watched as a heavy woman in a red coat walked down the hallway carrying a vase filled with red roses. He had begun to feel like someone pulled into an ongoing mystery, a passenger who’d happened to book a seat on the train the night an audience-participatory mystery was being staged. Or as if he were sitting in the front row, watching a bizarre comedy routine, and suddenly he had been pulled into the comic’s routine — exactly what had happened to him years before, at a comedy club in Portsmouth, with a spotlight on his face as he tried to appear good-natured about the comic’s insults. More bad-dream stuff: the anxiety dream of walking naked; the irrational conviction that he, alone, might be McCallum’s child’s savior; his obviously secondary position to Jenny Oughton and her world of what’s-taken-for-granted/what’s-helpful-to-know.
“What about this makes you feel genuinely helpless?” she said, her voice level, eyes filled with concern. My God — he must have spoken to her. She prompted: “The only person not part of the plot on the mystery train?”
“You know those games,” he said lamely.
“Yes. You feel that involving you in this, McCallum has tried to take away your autonomy?”
“I feel awkward about getting a freebie,” he said.
“Who’s giving you the freebie?”
He said: “Did you mean to send a bill?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I thought I was paraphrasing what you’d said, so I could be sure I understood. I wasn’t entirely sure if you were speaking literally or metaphorically. I was trying to understand, not to offer an opinion.”
“You know, this is going to sound really strange, but I just realized that something I do to keep my distance from people is just what you do when you mean to communicate,” he said. “Conversationally, I mean. I often try to — it’s not paraphrase, exactly, it’s more a honed-down version of what the person has said. To see if the person still agrees with the statement in the simpler, or the starker, form.”
This caused a frown. “Aren’t those two rather different things?” she said. “I wouldn’t think of simplicity and starkness as being the same.”
“This is really a very strange conversation to be having in the waiting room of a hospital,” he said.
“You don’t want to address my observation.” Her eyes sparkled. She meant it mischievously, a satire of the shrink playing shrink.
“You don’t seriously want to keep this up,” he said.
“You think I’m so different? You don’t think it’s possible I ever find myself in the middle of things without having anticipated everything?” She shrugged. “I have a problem managing my intensity sometimes,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Do you want to know simply, or starkly?” she said. He hesitated.