Patient after patient entered the office, bearing little in the way of emotional adventure. They were mostly veterans of vacation time, and he suspected more than once that they unconsciously believed it wise to withhold feelings that were going to be delayed a month in examination. Of course, what was held back was as intriguing as what might have been said, and with each patient he was alert to these holes in the narrative. He had immense trust in his ability to precisely remember words and phrases uttered beside him that might lurk profitably over the month hiatus.

In the minutes between sessions, he busily started to backtrack over his own years, starting to create a list of patients, jotting down names on a blank steno pad. As the day lengthened, so did the list. His memory, he thought, was still acute, which encouraged him. The only decision he had to make that day was at lunchtime, when he ordinarily would have stepped out on his daily walk, just as Rumplestiltskin had described. This day, he paused, part of him wanting to break the routine that the letter writer had so accurately portrayed, as some sort of act of defiance. Then, he’d realized that it was far more defiant to stick to the routine, and hope that the person watching him saw that he was uncowed by the letter. So out he went at noontime, walking the same path as always, putting his feet down in the same sidewalk squares, taking breaths of heavy city air with the same regularity as he did each day. He was unsure whether he wanted Rumplestiltskin to follow him, or not. But he discovered that every pace he took seemed to be echoed, and more than once he had to fight the urge to pivot quickly and see if he was being trailed. When he returned to his apartment, he was breathing heavily with relief.

The afternoon patients followed the same pattern as the morning group.

A few had some bitterness toward the upcoming vacation; this was as he expected. Some expressed a bit of fear and more than a little anxiety. The routine of daily fifty-minute sessions was powerful, and it was unsettling for several to know that even for a short time they would be without that particular anchor. Still, they and he knew that the time would pass, and as with everything in analysis, the time spent away from the couch could lead to insights about the process. Everything, every moment, anything during the day-to-day of life, might be associated with insight. It was what made the process fascinating for both patient and doctor.

At one minute before five, he glanced out his window. The summer day was still dominating the world outside the office: bright sun, temperatures creeping up into the nineties. The city heat had an insistence to it, demanding to be acknowledged. He listened to the hum of the air conditioner, and suddenly recalled what it was like when he was first starting out, and an open window and a rattling old oscillating fan was all the relief he could afford from the hazy, stultifying atmosphere of the city in July. Sometimes, he thought, it seems as if there is no air anywhere.

He tore his eyes away from the window when he heard the three peals of the buzzer. He pushed himself to his feet, and walked over to the door, pulling it open quickly to allow Mr. Zimmerman with all his impatience to enter immediately. Zimmerman did not like to wait in the anteroom. He showed up seconds before the session was to begin, and expected to be admitted instantaneously. Ricky had once spied the man marching up and down the sidewalk outside the apartment building on a bitter winter evening, furiously glancing at his watch every few seconds, trying to will the time to pass so that he did not have to wait inside. On more than one occasion, Ricky had been tempted to let the man cool his heels for a few minutes, to see if he could stimulate some understanding on Zimmerman’s part as to why being so precise was so important. But he had not done this. Instead, Ricky swung open the door at exactly five o ’clock every weekday, so that the angry man could barrel into the treatment room, toss himself down on the couch, and launch immediately into sarcasm and fury over all the wrongs that had been perpetrated on him that day. Ricky took a deep breath as he opened his door, and adopted his best poker face. Regardless of whether Ricky felt inside he was holding a full house or a jack-high bust, Zimmerman got the same noncommittal look each day.

“Good afternoon,” he started, his standard greeting.

But it was not Roger Zimmerman in the waiting room.

Instead, Ricky was suddenly eye-to-eye with a striking and statuesque young woman.

She wore a long black belted raincoat that dropped to her shoes, far out of place on the hot summer day, dark sunglasses, which she removed quickly, revealing penetrating vibrant green eyes. He would have guessed her age at somewhere just on the better side of thirty. A woman whose considerable looks were at their peak and whose understanding of the world had sharpened past youth.

“I’m sorry…” Ricky said hesitantly. “But…”

“Oh,” the young woman replied airily, shaking shoulder-length blond hair and gesturing smoothly with her hand. “Zimmerman won’t be here today. I came instead.”

“But he…”

“He won’t be needing you any longer,” she continued. “He decided to conclude his treatment at precisely two-thirty-seven this afternoon. Curiously enough, he was at the 92nd Street subway station when he reached this decision after the briefest of conversations with Mr. R. It was Mr. R. who persuaded him that he no longer needed or desired your services. And to our surprise, it wasn’t all that difficult for Zimmerman to reach that conclusion, either.”

And then she pushed past the startled doctor into his office.

Chapter Four

So,” the young woman said breezily, “this is where the mystery unfolds.”

Ricky had wordlessly trailed her into his office, where he watched as she surveyed the small room. Her eyes lingered on the couch, his chair, his desk. She walked over and inspected the books he had on the shelves, nodding her head as she absorbed the thick and stodgy titles. She ran a finger along the spine of one text, then noted the dust that came away on her fingertip, causing her to shake her head. “Not used much…,” she muttered. She lifted her eyes to his once, saying reproachfully, “What? Not a single volume of verse, or work of fiction?” Then she approached the cream-colored wall where he’d hung his diplomas and several small pieces of art, alongside a modestly sized oak-framed portrait of the great man himself. In the picture he was holding his ubiquitous cigar, staring balefully out with his deeply recessed eyes, white beard covering the precancerous jaw that would prove to be so unbearably painful in his last years. She tapped the glass over the portrait with a long finger, tipped with nails painted a fire-engine red.

“Isn’t it interesting how every profession seems to have some icon hanging on the wall. I mean, if I went to see a priest, he’d have a Jesus on a crucifix somewhere. A rabbi would have a Star of David, or a menorah. Every two-bit politician puts up a picture of Lincoln or Washington. There really ought to be a law against that. Medical doctors like to have those little plastic cutaway models of a heart or a knee or some other organ within easy reach. For all I know, a computer programmer out in Silicon Valley nails up a portrait of Bill Gates on the wall of his cubicle where he worships daily. A psychoanalyst like you, Ricky, needs the picture of Saint Sigmund. It lets everyone who enters here know who truly created the ground rules. And it gives you a tiny little bit of legitimacy that might otherwise be called into question, I suppose.”

Ricky Starks silently picked up an armchair and moved it to the space in front of his desk. Then he maneuvered to the opposite side, and gestured to the young woman to take a seat.