The Analyst (15 page)

Ricky’s head spun.

Any elation he felt at outmaneuvering the attorney that morning dissipated, replaced with a queasiness bordering on nausea that seemed to start in his stomach, but which he guessed was really psychosomatic. He rode the elevator to his home with the sensation of weight dragging at his heels, resting on his shoulders. The first threads of self-pity crept into his heart, the
Why me?
question dogging his slow steps. By the time he reached his office, he felt exhausted.

He threw himself down behind his desk and seized the letter from the Psychoanalytic Society. He mentally crossed off the lawyer’s name, though he wasn’t silly enough to think that he had heard the last from Merlin, whoever he was. The name of the Boston-based therapist that his alleged victim was seeing was included in the letter, and Ricky understood that was undoubtedly meant to be his next call. For a moment, he wanted to ignore the name, not do what he was clearly supposed to do, but then, equally, he realized that failing to vigorously protest his innocence would be considered the act of a guilty man, so, even if it was anticipated and equally useless, he had to make that call.

Still feeling sick to his stomach, Ricky reached out and dialed the therapist’s number. It rang once, then, as he’d half expected, he got an answering machine: “This is Doctor Martin Soloman. I cannot take your call at this moment. Please leave your name and number and a brief message, and I will get back to you promptly.” At least, Ricky thought, he hasn’t left for vacation yet.

“Doctor Soloman,” Ricky said briskly, an actor trying to fill his voice with an element of outrage and indignation, “this is Doctor Frederick Starks in Manhattan. I have been accused by a patient of yours of serious misconduct. I would like to inform you that these allegations are totally false. They are fantasy, without any basis in substance or reality. Thank you.”

Then he hung up. The solidity of his message restored some of his spirits. He looked at his watch. Five minutes, he thought. Ten at the most, before he calls back.

About this he was correct. At the seven-minute mark, the telephone rang.

He answered with a solid, deep, “Doctor Starks speaking.”

The man at the other end of the line seemed to inhale sharply before saying, “Doctor, this is Martin Soloman. I received your brief message and thought it wise if I got right back to you.”

Ricky waited for a moment or two, filling the line with silence, before continuing, “Who is your patient, who has accused me of this reprehensible behavior?”

He was greeted with an equal space of quiet, before Soloman said, “I don’t know that I’m at liberty yet to divulge her name. She has told me that when investigators from the proper medical ethics authorities contact this office, she will make herself available. Merely voicing the complaint to the New York Psychoanalytic Society was an important first step in her recovery. She needs to proceed cautiously. But this seems incredible to me, doctor. Surely you know who your patients were such a short time ago? And claims such as hers, with the detail she has provided me over the past six months, certainly lend credence to what she’s said.”

“Detail?” Ricky asked. “What sort of detail?”

The doctor hesitated. “Well, I don’t know how much-”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t believe for a second that this person exists,” Ricky interrupted sharply.

“I can assure you she is completely real. And her pain is substantial,” the therapist said, mimicking what Merlin the lawyer had pronounced earlier that day. “Frankly, doctor, I find your denials less than persuasive.”

“Then what details?”

Soloman hesitated before saying, “She has described you, physically and intimately. She has described your office. She can imitate your voice, which, I might say now, seems an uncannily accurate imitation…”

“Impossible,” Ricky blurted.

Doctor Soloman paused again, then asked, “Tell me, doctor, on the wall in your office next to the portrait of Freud, is there a small blue and yellow woodcut of a Cape Cod sunset?”

Ricky almost choked. Of the few pieces of art remaining in the monastic world of his office and apartment, that was one. It had been a present to him from his wife on their fifteenth wedding anniversary, and it was one of the few items that survived his purge of her presence after she succumbed to cancer.

Soloman continued, “It’s there isn’t it? My patient said that she would focus on that particular piece of art, trying to will herself into the picture, while you were abusing her sexually. Like an out-of-body experience. I’ve known other victims of sex crimes to do the same, to imagine themselves someplace other than reality. It’s not an uncommon defense mechanism.”

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 therapist.

“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…”