17

My job is to be nice to annoying people-people in strange states, who aren’t acting right, who have problems that stop them from relating properly to others. There’s no one so hard to be with as a depressed person locked within himself. We’re like friends, but friends who don’t get bored or frustrated and try to change the subject.

That’s my way of looking at it, even if it’s low-paid work by the standards of medicine. Spending forty-five minutes listening to someone for $400 sounds okay, but it isn’t plastic surgery-style wealth. So my profession is drifting away from it, leaving it to psychologists with their happy-talk cognitive behavioral therapy, using checklists to persuade people that they worry too much. It’s more efficient to practice genetic medicine and hand out pills in fifteen-minute sessions to alter people’s brain chemistry. This patient has the short arm of the transporter gene, so she’s got serotonin imbalance. Give her a re-uptake inhibitor and she’ll be good to go. If that doesn’t work, try another brand or combine it with a lithium booster. There’s an entire algorithm of combinations to try before you have to admit defeat.

Some residents want to forget all about therapy, and there’s not much evidence that it works, although no drug company will fund the research, so who knows? Should we leave people in misery because their moods can’t be measured scientifically? It’s a matter of personality-the psych’s, I mean, not the patient’s. Therapy suits me even if it’s a fading form of medicine. I like sitting and listening, trying to reconcile the latest story I’m told by a familiar patient with what he’s said before or probing the mask of a new one.

The afternoon sun was reflecting off the windows on a nearby block and I’d lowered the blinds behind me to shield Lauren’s eyes.

“Tell me more about your work,” I said.

“I’m a partner at a place you’ve probably never heard of, called Fleming Dupont. Before that I was with Seligman Brothers.”

“I’ve heard of them.”

She smiled, perfectly in control. “I’m sure you have. They’ve been in the news. You want to know about my work. What do you notice about me?”

“How do you mean?”

“What I’m wearing,” she said impatiently. “How I look.”

I allowed my gaze to travel from her face down her body to her leather shoes and up again. She was little changed from the first time: her makeup was immaculate, with her brown hair fastened a touch more severely at the side of her head, and she wore a similar suit. Her blouse had wide mother-of-pearl buttons and no ruffle. As before, her suit was well cut enough to be demure while giving off a hint of femininity.

“Professional,” I said.

“What you mean is, I’m dressed like a man,” she said, not hesitating before restating my summary. “A black pantsuit and pumps, no cleavage. I’m in uniform. I wear the same goddamn thing every day. One Armani suit after another.”

“Is that to impress your clients?”

“I don’t think they care. No, it’s because of all the guys around me. I have to blend in. They’re all fragile egos, men who measure their worth by what they earn. They can’t stand the idea of a chick being better than them.”

“ Areyou better than them?”

She looked at me coolly, as if weighing whether to be honest. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am-most of them, anyway. I work harder, I hear more. They’re so busy showing off, they don’t listen to the client. I listen and I pick up anything that helps the deal. It’s similar to your job, I guess.”

“I know someone from Seligman,” I said.

She paused and I could see her brain puzzling as she tried to work out if I was going to talk about Harry. I enjoyed the sensation of power, of being able to shock her. She was wondering how far I was willing to go, I could see. That was the same thing I wondered about her.

“Who?” she said.

“John Underwood. We met by chance.”

She grimaced. “Underwood always hated me, thought I was a bitch. I used to call him the ice-cream guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I started on Wall Street, all of the men told me the same story. If you’re with the ice-cream seller, you love ice cream. You love vanilla, you love strawberry-whatever he’s got. If you’re with the frozen yogurt man, you hate ice cream.”

She paused as if she had imparted a self-evident truth.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

She laughed. It was a nice sound, high and throaty, as if she liked my bluntness. The pristine contours of her face relaxed, giving a glimpse of a different woman, one who wasn’t so constrained.

“I’ll try again,” she said. “I advise CEOs, tell them to sell companies or buy others, or restructure. Every time there’s a deal, we get a fee. It could be $5 million, could be $20 million. It’s a lot, anyway. The business is full of liars and egomaniacs. That’s what they do-buy ice cream. Tell the CEO they love whatever he’s got. All deals are great.”

“But they’re not?”

“No, they’re not. A few are disasters and it’s our job to warn the CEO, to stop him from doing the wrong one. If you tell him not to do the deal, you won’t get paid your fee, but it’s the best advice you’ll ever give.”

So why didn’t someone tell Harry not to buy Greene’s bank?I thought. It was the first time I’d thought of that. I hadn’t known how Wall Street worked until she’d told me. Harry had made the affair sound like a handshake between the two men. Sure, Marcus, we’ll take a look, he’d told Greene. But if there had been something wrong with Greene’s bank, why hadn’t anyone found it? On the most important deal of all-the one involving Seligman itself-Harry had been stranded.

The thought distracted me for a minute, and when I looked up, Lauren had a strange expression, as if something were welling up inside her. Her lips were pursed and she was staring at me.

“Psychiatrists mustn’t sleep with their patients, must they?” she said.

She looked at me inquiringly, as if it were an intriguing academic point rather than the most explosive issue in therapy. The relationship between a psych and a patient of the opposite sex involves the greatest intimacy there is short of a sexual one, albeit one-sided. The patient tells us things she wouldn’t confess to anyone else but a lover. That makes it dangerous. We were schooled in the pitfalls as well as the uses of transference, the risk of therapy slipping into illicit intimacy.

“That’s malpractice. It’s an abuse of the therapeutic relationship and it would harm the patient.”

“You’d lose your job?” She gazed directly at me, and I started to feel embarrassed, as if she were accusing me of misconduct.

“Any psychiatrist who did that would.”

“So your job’s like mine.”

She wasn’t talking about me, I realized-she meant herself. Her gaze had gone from me and was back in the middle distance. Her expression didn’t change, but for the first time I sensed sadness in her, a lake of longing.

“I had an affair with Harry Shapiro,” she said flatly. “It was so …” She paused, as if searching for a big enough word, and frowned with frustration and regret. “Stupid,” she concluded.

“What happened?”

“Underwood did it, that’s the crazy thing. I worked with him and he couldn’t stand me showing him up. He was so keen to stop me making partner, to block me. He would shut me out of the credit on the deals I’d brought in, throw me off others. It happened so often, I decided I either had to leave, or go to Harry.

“I’d never really spoken to him, only in client meetings. I thought he was an animal, like people said. But he wasn’t like that. He listened to me, he sympathized. He sorted it out so that Underwood backed off. I hadn’t seen that side of him. I’d just separated, I was lonely.”

I waited. It wasn’t hard to contain my reaction since I’d known about her affair, but it was a relief. The tension I’d felt of waiting for her revelation to emerge had dissipated. We were back on the usual footing of a psych and his patient, with her holding the secrets rather than me. Yet I also felt a sense of foreboding. The door of confidentiality had slammed shut on the secret of Harry’s affair, like that of a jail or a closed ward.