The Analyst (7 page)

He did something he almost never did. Instead of hailing a cab, Ricky set off to cross Central Park on foot. He thought the time and exertion would help him to straighten out his emotions, get a grip on what was happening to him. But despite his training, and vaunted powers of concentration, he had trouble remembering what it was that Virgil said to him, though he had no difficulty recalling every nuance of her body, from the smile playing on her lips, the curve of her breasts, to the shape of her sex.

The day’s heat lingered into the early evening. Within a few hundred yards he felt sticky sweat gathering at his neck and under his arms. He loosened his tie and removed his blazer, slinging it over his back, giving him a jaunty appearance that contradicted how he felt. The park was still filled with folks exercising, more than once he stepped aside to oblige a phalanx of joggers. He could see orderly people walking their dogs in dog-walking designated areas, and he passed a half-dozen softball games in progress. The baseball fields were all laid out so that the outfields overlapped. He noticed that often the right fielder on one team was standing more or less next to the left fielder of another, in a different game. There seemed to be an odd, city-defined etiquette to this shared space, each person trying to maintain focus on his own game, while not intruding on the other. Occasionally a ball struck by the team at bat would invade the premises of the opposite game, and those players would diligently step aside to accommodate the disruption, before resuming play. Ricky thought life was rarely that simple and infrequently that balletlike. Usually, he thought, we get in one another’s ways.

It took him another quarter hour of briskly paced walking to reach the block where Zimmerman’s apartment building was. By now, he was genuinely sweaty, and he wished he’d worn some old tennis shoes or runner’s shoes, rather than the leather wingtips that seemed tight and threatened to give him a blister. He could feel a clammy dampness soaking through his undershirt, staining his oxford blue dress shirt. He thought his hair was matted and sticking to his forehead. Ricky hesitated in front of a store’s plate glass window, trying to assess his reflection, seeing instead of the orderly, composed physician who greeted his patients poker-faced at his office door, a bedraggled, anxious man, caught up in a maze of indecision. He looked harried, disheveled, and probably a little bit frightened, he thought, and he took a few moments to try to compose himself.

Never before, in the entirety of his almost three decades of practice, had he broken from the rigid and formalized relationship between patient and analyst. Not once had he ever imagined going to a patient’s home to check on them. No matter how deep the despair the client might have felt, they traveled with their depression to him. They reached out to him. If distraught and overwhelmed, they called him, and made an appointment to see him, in his office. It was an integral part of the process of getting better. As hard as it was for some people, as crippled as they might be by their emotions, the mere physical act of coming to see him was a critical step. To step outside the confines of ’s office was a complete rarity. It seemed cruel, sometimes, the artificial barriers and distances created by the relationship between patient and doctor, but it was out of those same distances that insight was discovered.

He hesitated on the corner, a half block from Zimmerman’s apartment, a little astonished to find himself in that spot. That his hesitation was not all that different from Zimmerman’s occasional pacing outside the doors to Ricky’s office, was lost on him.

He took two or three steps down the block, then stopped.

He shook his head, and said, out loud, but under his breath, “I can’t do this.”

A young couple passing a few feet away must have heard his words, because the man said, “Sure you can, fella. It’s not that hard,” as if in reply. The young woman hanging on his arm burst into a laugh, then mock punched the man in the arm, as if to chastise him for being witty and rude, at the same time. They continued past him, and on into whatever their evening held for them, while Ricky stood, rocking like a boat tugging at its mooring, unable to move, but being pulled hard by wind and currents nonetheless.

“What did she say?” he whispered to himself.

Zimmerman decided to end his treatment at precisely 2:37 p.m. in a nearby subway stop.

This made no sense.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw a telephone kiosk on the corner. He strode over to the phone bank and stuck a quarter in the pay phone, rapidly punching in Zimmerman’s number. Again the phone rang a dozen times, unanswered.

This time, however, Ricky felt relieved. The absence of a response at Zimmerman’s house seemed to absolve him of the need to knock on the man’s door, although he was surprised that Zimmerman’s mother did not pick up. According to her son, she was bedridden most of the day, incapacitated and sickly, except for the unfettered and nearly inexhaustible supply of angry demands and belittling comments that she delivered nonstop.

He hung up the telephone and stepped back. He took a long look down the block where Zimmerman’s apartment was, and then shook his head. He told himself: You’ve got to take control of this situation. The threatening letter, the child being singled out for pornography, the sudden appearance of a naked and quite stunning woman in his office, had all upset his equilibrium. He needed, he thought, to impose order back on events, and then chart a simple course through the game that he was caught up inside. What he didn’t need to do, he told himself, was to throw away almost a year of analysis with Roger Zimmerman because he was frightened and acting rashly.

Telling himself these things, reassured him. He turned away, determined to head back to his home and start packing for his vacation.

His eyes, however, caught the entrance to the 92nd Street subway station. Like so many other stations, this was nothing more than a set of stairs that descended into the earth, with a modest yellow lettered sign above. He moved in that direction, paused momentarily at the head of the stairs, then stepped down, driven suddenly by a sense of error and fear, as if something was just slowly emerging from mist and fog and becoming clear. His footsteps clattered on the steps. Artificial light hummed and buzzed and reflected off the tiles on the walls. A distant train groaned through a tunnel. A musty, aged odor, like opening a closet that has been shut for years overcame him, followed by a sense of contained heat, as if the day’s temperatures had baked the station, and it was only now starting to cool. There were few people in the station at that moment, and he spotted a single black woman working in the token kiosk. He waited for a moment, for a second when she was not being harried by people making change, and then he approached. He bent toward the round, silver metal speaking filter in her Plexiglas window.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“You want change? Directions? Map’s on the wall over there.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I wonder, I’m sorry this sounds strange but…”

“What you want, fella?”

“Well, I was wondering, did something happen down here today? This afternoon…”

“You gotta talk to the cops about that,” she said briskly. “Happened before my shift.”

“But what…”

“I wadn’t here. Didn’t see nothing.”

“But what happened?”

“Guy jumped in front offa train. Or fell, I dunno. Cops been here and gone already by the time my shift begun. Cleaned up the mess and gathered up a coupla witnesses. That’s it.”

“What cops?”

“Transit. Ninety-sixth and Broadway. Talk to them. I got no details at all.”

Ricky stepped back, his stomach clenched, head spinning, almost nauseous. He needed air, and there was none inside the station. A train approached, filling the station with a steady screeching noise, as if the act of slowing for the stop was torturous. The sound flooded over him, pummeling him like fists.

“You okay, mister?” the woman in the booth shouted above the racket. “You look kinda sick.”

He nodded, and whispered a reply that she undoubtedly couldn’t hear. “I’m fine,” he said, but this was clearly a lie. Like a drunk trying to maneuver a car through twisting roads, Ricky swerved toward the exit.

Everything about the world Ricky entered that evening was alien to him.

The sights, sounds, and smells of the Transit Authority police station at 96th and Broadway seemed to him to represent a window on the city that he’d never before looked through and that he was only vaguely aware existed. There was a faint aroma of urine and vomit fighting the harsher odor of strong disinfectant right inside the headquarters door, as if someone had been violently ill and the cleanup had been sloppily and hastily managed in the aftermath. The pungency made him hesitate, just long enough to be overcome with a curious din, the blending of the routine and the surreal. A man was shouting unintelligible word concoctions from some hidden holding area, words that seemed to reverberate around the entranceway unconnected to everything else going on. There was an angry woman holding a crying child in front of the sergeant’s thick wooden reception desk, spilling out imprecations in rapid-fire Spanish. Police officers creaked past him, their light blue shirts dampened with sweat from the day’s lingering heat, their leather weapons belts making an odd counterpoint to the squeaking of their polished black shoes. A telephone rang somewhere hidden, unanswered. There were comings and goings, laughter and tears, all punctuated with bursts of obscenities emanating either from rough-edged officers or the occasional visitors, several in handcuffs, who were swept beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the reception area.

Ricky swayed inside the door, assaulted by all he saw and heard, unsure what to do. An officer suddenly brushed past him in a hurry, saying “Ouddadaway fella, coming through here…” making him step forward abruptly, as if jerked by a rope.

The woman at the sergeant’s desk raised her fist and shook it at the officer manning the reception area, let burst with a final cascade of words run together into a solid wall of insults, and, giving the child a shake and a twist, turned away, scowling, pushing past Ricky as if he were as insignificant as a cockroach. Ricky stumbled ahead and approached the officer behind the desk. Someone once standing approximately where Ricky took up his position had surreptitiously carved
FU
in the wood, an opinion that no one apparently cared enough to delete.

“I’m sorry,” Ricky started, only to be interrupted.

“Nobody’s ever really sorry, fella. It’s just what they say. Never really mean it. But hey, I’ll listen to anybody. So, what is it that you think you’re sorry about?”

“No, you misunderstand me. What I mean is…”

“No one ever says what they mean, either. Important lesson in life. It’d be helpful if more people would learn it.”

The policeman was probably in his early forties and wore an insouciant smile that seemed to indicate that he’d seen just about everything up to this point in his life worth seeing. He was a thickset man, with a solid, bodybuilder’s neck and sleek black hair that was pushed slickly back from his forehead. The surface of the desk was littered with paper forms and incident reports, seemingly tossed about with no concept of organization. Occasionally the officer would grab a couple and staple them together, punching the old-fashioned desk stapler with a bang before tossing them in a wire basket.

“Let me start over,” Ricky finally stated sharply. The policeman grinned again, shaking his head.

“No one ever gets to start over-at least, not in my experience. We all say that we want to find a way to begin life all over again, but it just doesn’t work out that way. But hey, give it a shot. Maybe you’ll be the first. So, how can I help you, fella?”

“Earlier today there was an incident at the 92nd Street station. A man fell…”

“Jumped, I heard. You a witness?”

“No. But I knew the man, I believe. I was his doctor. I need information…”

“Doctor, huh? What sort of doctor?”

“He was in psychoanalytic treatment with me for the past year.”

“You’re a shrink?”

Ricky nodded.

“Interesting job, that,” the officer said. “You use one of those couches?”

“That’s correct.”

“No shit? And people still have stuff to talk about? Me, I think I’d be looking for a catnap as soon as I put my head down. One yawn and I’d be out like a light. But people really talk up a storm, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

“Cool. Well, one guy ain’t gonna be talking no more. You better speak to the detective. Head through the double doors, keep going down the corridor, office is on the left. Riggins caught the case. Or what there was of it after the Eighth Avenue express came through the 92nd Street station at about sixty miles per. You want details, that’s where to go. Talk to the detective.”

The policeman gestured in the direction of a pair of doors that led into the bowels of the station. As he pointed, Ricky could hear a spiraling sound rising from some room that seemed alternately below and then above them. The desk sergeant smiled. “That guy’s gonna get on my nerves before the night is out,” he said, turning away and picking up a sheaf of papers and stapling them together with a noise like a gunshot. “If he doesn’t shut up, I’m likely to need a shrink of my own by the end of the night. What you need, doc, is a portable couch.” He laughed, made a swooping motion with his hand, the papers rustling in the breeze, shooing Ricky in the right direction.

There was a door on the left marked detective bureau which Ricky Starks pushed through, entering a small office warren of grimy gray steel desks and more of the sickeningly bright overhead lighting. He blinked for a second, as if the glare stung his eyes like saltwater. A detective wearing a white shirt and red tie, sitting at the closest desk, looked up at him.