I WAS GOING TO BE LATE. A fat woman in a quilted brown parka--she looked like a walking onion--had kept everyone waiting in the heavy snow at Ninety-sixth and Broadway while she argued with the driver. She was trying to get him to take a transfer from the day before. She insisted, loudly, that a downtown driver had just issued the transfer to her. "It couldn't be, lady," the driver said. His Caribbean accent, his delicate features, the touch of gray at his temples made him seem like an aristocrat with favors to dispense, especially in the presence of the bulging woman and the huddled masses outside. "I'm telling you not five minutes ago," the woman said. "And I'm telling you that he couldn't have any transfers from yesterday," the driver said. "They are destroyed each day." Holding aloft the slip of blue paper, the woman turned around and shouted at the rest of us, bunched up against the snow and wind blasting off the Hudson, "Five minutes ago! Five minutes!" During the silent glaring that followed, another crosstown bus stopped across the street, and among the passengers who got off were four or five Coventry School seniors, dressed only in sports jackets and slacks and sneakers. In two hours some of them would jostle their way into my second-period eleventh-grade English class, and I would give them farcical interpretations of the first half of Billy Budd until one of the quicker ones began to suspect I was putting them on. "Hey, Mr. Singer," one boy called. "Hey, Jake, where ya headed?" another shouted, probably taking the weather as permission for impertinence. If I'd wanted to answer the question, I would have said, "Boys, I'm going to see my psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernesto Morales." And if I'd wanted to amplify, I'd have added, "He's a Cuban, and a devout Catholic, apparently. There's a crucifix in the waiting room and another one on the wall behind his chair. I got his name from the school psychologist." And if I were histrionic, like the fat woman, I would have gone on yelling my plaint for all to hear: "You see, boys, I am in real trouble. My mother died when I was six, on the day before Halloween--Mischief Night, if you're susceptible to ironies, as I know a few of you are when you manage to stay awake in class--my father and I are barely on speaking terms, and my girlfriend left me two months ago. And I'm not going to be head of the English Department next year after all. I told the headmaster that I thought the football coach was too hard on the players, and he didn't want to hear it, so he used it as an excuse not to give me the job." But no. It would never do even to allude to my problems to the boys. First of all, I wasn't so crazy that I didn't know how boring my plight would be to most people. Even the banality of evil is outstripped by the banality of anxiety neurosis. Second, the kids weren't my friends, and third, even though they weren't my friends, they were all I had left. Anyway, I was sure at the time that I wouldn't be seeing Dr. Morales much longer. He was a madman privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience, and I was just trying to keep him at a distance as I planned my escape--into what, I had no idea. The school psychologist must have been crazy herself. "How long are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like this?" the fat woman demanded of the wind. "Come on," I said. "Here. I was third in line, and I reached around the person in front of me and handed the fat woman a token. The woman snatched it from my hand. "It's not the money," she said angrily. "It's the way we are treated. But obviously you don't care about that. So all right, all right." She put the token and the transfer into her purse and took out another transfer. She turned around, the fabric of her casing sighing against the metal panels of the bus's entryway, and handed the second transfer to the driver. "Can you beat it?" the driver said to me as I paid my fare. TEN MINUTES AFTER my session should have started, I pushed the buzzer outside the door of the brownstone in which Dr. Morales's office occupied the rear of the top floor, and he buzzed me in. In the stuffy, overheated waiting room, the white-noise machine was hissing away. The machine could sound like anything--wind in a cane field outside Havana, a wave receding on a beach, a tiger's warning--but today it was just static. I looked out the window, which was flanked by two big flowerpots out of which Cacti freudii derelicti thornily protruded. In the backyard of the house across the way, snow was building up on the back of the huge sow. "Yes, I know the story of this pig," Dr. Morales had said a few weeks earlier. "This was Johnny Carson's house, and he had the statue installed in the yard. And when he moved he did not take the pig." "It's strange," I said. "I agree," Dr. Morales said, "but what is even stranger to me is that you have not mentioned it before now. You have been coming three times a week for how long-two months now?" "Four," I said. "But who's counting?" "We shall get back to your anger in a moment," he said. "But right now perhaps you could talk a little about why you did not bring up such an odd thing for such a long time." This was as far as I got in my recollection of the pig conversation, which had quickly and typically put us at sword's point, when Dr. Morales opened the door to his inner office. He was beaming, as usual, and was bent at the waist at the customary ten-degree angle, in what I took to be sarcastic deference. This upper-body inclination made him seem even shorter than he was. He had on a white shirt and the vest and trousers of a three-piece suit, and his shoulders ballooned out like a miniature stevedore's. Light bounced off his shiny bald head, and behind his straight, heavy, broomlike black beard and narrow mustache, he was smiling the diabolical smile he always smiled. "Good morning, Mr. Singer," he said in his insinuating way--his voice, as always, even more flamboyantly Spanished in reality than it was in my memory. "Please come in." "There was this fat woman on the bus," I started out after I lay down on the couch. I told him the rest. "She was probably on the way to her analyst," I said at the end. "Life in the city. How can someone let herself get so fat?" "What do you think?" Dr. Morales said. "Well, I suppose with some people it's just their metabolism or glands or something." "So you are apologizing for her and for yourself." "Myself?" "With this `Well, I suppose.' This is a habit, as I have pointed out before. You guess, you suppose, you think maybe. You castrate yourself before it happens, what you so fear--that if you display your balls, someone else will cut them off. Preemptive self-castration." "Opinions are testicles?" "Yes. And so are feelings. You are amused, but this is the case. And people do not let themselves get fat, by the way. Again we have this passivity. They make themselves fat." "Well, so why do they do it?" "You must tell me what you think." "It could be physical. They might--" Dr. Morales dropped some papers on the floor. As he picked them up, he said, "Now we are like--what do you call them?--a champster on a wheel." "Hamster. But sometimes it must be physiological." "When it is, it is boring. As boring as this conversation. Unfortunate, maybe even tragic, but boring. The majority are fat because they want to be fat. They feel entitled to have more room and more attention than other people. They talk too loudly and they take up two seats on the bus. They cheave themselves around, and everyone else has to make room for them. And excuses, as you are doing. If you go to the mountain for a hike with them, they get out of breath going up the hill and you have to wait for them. They want attention, and they are saying they should not have to take responsibility for what they do." Dr. Morales paused. "You are smiling again, I can tell." "It seems to me so outrageous as to be funny," I said. "But were you not angry at this woman?" "Of course. I told you." "Then why do you laugh when I am denouncing her?" The office was silent except for the ticking of the wind-driven snow against the windows. "Maybe it's because it would never enter my mind to go on a mountain hike with a fat person." "Again the `maybe.' You disavow your anger, and you do not have the courage of your own contempt. She is a clown, I am a clown, the entire world is a circus, correct? But even then it is only maybe that the whole world is a circus and everyone except you is a clown. I must tell you honestly that I do not know how to proceed right now." "I did not disavow my anger," I said. "Ah, but you did, you did," Dr. Morales said. "You presented it as if it were a play and you were a character but in the audience at the same time. You had even a title for it, as I recall. The Life of the City." "Life in the City," I said. "Now, really, Mr. Singer, I must protest. You are correcting me and resisting the treatment at every drop of the hat. You do not want intercourse but frottage." "All right. I was angry at the fat woman on the bus." "Oh, thank the good Lord Jesus Christ. Why?" "Because she stole a token from me." "No." "She made me late for the session." "At last the penis goes inside the vagina. But not quite yet with the ejaculation." "What did I miss? Oh, I get it. Me. I made myself late." "And at whom are you angry?" "Myself?" "Why?" "Because I was late? By the way, is there a makeup test if I fail?" "You know, Mr. Singer, you are a gigantic pain in the ass. Now, again, why were you angry at yourself?" "I already said: because I was naughty." "AND SO AT LAST WE HAVE FINALLY MADE THE BABY," Dr. Morales declaimed. "But I already said that." "No, you will have to pardon me, Mr. Singer, but you said first that you were angry at yourself because you were late. The second time, you said it was because you were nowty. Now, do not sigh this way, please. You are an English teacher. You know that the choice of words always matters." "So I was naughty, like a little boy." "Exactly." Dr. Morales shuffled his papers. "When I'm late, I'm always testing you or trying to provoke you." "Yes, especially if you could express the idea a little less like a quadratic equation, with a little more feeling. You are like a three-year-old who takes down his pants and shows his penis and testicles and anus, all the dirty parts, to see if your mommy will love you anyway, even though you are nowty. You are angry at yourself because you are in reality an adult who has allowed his unconscious to be seen. You also use your lateness to get me off the tracks of your more serious problems and to get extra attention for yourself." "Like being a fat person." "Oho! We have engendered twins today. Yes, the fat lady makes passengers wait. You make me wait. You are amused again." "All your patients probably do the same kind of thing." "This is guesswork, and in any case, much as you might like to, you cannot throw your arm on my shoulders and talk to me as a colleague about my other patients." "The guy after me is often late." "Perhaps he does not have a regular appointment time. You are hunting with blinders and without a license." "Sometimes when I leave I see him running down the street." Dr. Morales yawned loudly. The wind moaned around the windows, as if nature itself wanted an audience with him. The radiator behind his chair clanked and spluttered, the noise machine in the waiting room hissed, and the air seemed closer and hotter than ever. At length he said, "Are you not tired, Mr. Singer, from lifting these sandbags and throwing them up against the treatment here? You are only hurting yourself, you know. And the more construction you perform on this wall behind which you try to hide, the more clearly you can be seen." "Then what's the problem? If it's all grist for the mill, it doesn't matter what I talk about, right?" Another yawn, this one downright theatrical. "I guess that to you, people who are fat or late for the ordinary little neurotic reasons must be just as boring as those whose pituitaries have run amok or who get detained by a police roadblock. It must be excruciating for you." "Nor do I need your sympathy, Mr. Singer. And I do not recall saying that your neurosis was little. You have now succeeded in filling up fifteen of the thirty-five minutes available with dramaturgical exercises, procedural pettiness, philosophical speculation, an attempt to join the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and form a partnership with me, and condescension to the tedium of my practice. Not one mention of the headmaster who has reneged on his promise, not one mention of the woman who left you, not one mention of the joy of teaching, not one mention of the sadness you must feel about your estrangement from your father, not one mention of what you are doing in your sex life these days. I suspect that your being late is in fact not a plea for attention but a reluctance to tell me that you have been masturbating." "I'm sorry. I guess I was just struck by how boring many aspects of your work must be, and I said what was on my mind, as you are always haranguing me to do." A long silence ensued. "You are kind to think of my working conditions, even when your thoughtfulness is diluted by the guesswork that precedes it," Dr. Morales said. "Perhaps you would like to vary my routine for me by going outside and taking a walk in the snow in the park?" "Well, you have been yawning and rearranging your papers back there." "I must congratulate you. You have graduated from being my partner to being my analyst. Shall we go?" "You're serious?" "There are no jokes, Mr. Singer." THE SUN WAS UP high enough behind the clouds to give the air the bright, false-spring light that always marks an hour or two of daytime snowstorms before afternoon arrives and the gloom lowers. The wind was coming from behind us, at the same speed we were walking, and the snow had retired from fine urgency to flaky slowness, its movement more horizontal than vertical, so that as Dr. Morales and I walked to the end of the block we seemed to be moving without moving. He had on a coat and hat so bulbous and red and shiny--it must have been some sort of weird new synthetic fabric--that he looked like a postmodern mountain climber or an explorer or astronaut. He didn't appear to notice the glances he got from nearly everyone we passed, but charged ahead as if he had just caught sight of some lunar objective. I tried to keep up. We entered the park at Ninetieth Street and went down a small hill. Paths that had been shovelled were already recovered by snow, and the banks stood three or four feet high on either side. We walked in silence for a few minutes, following a course that took us--appropriately, it occurred to me--in a large circle. At the halfway point, Dr. Morales asked, "What are you thinking about?" and I said, "Not much." When we got back to where we had started, I stopped and scooped up some snow, made it into a snowball, and threw it at a tree about fifty feet off. It nicked the trunk. "What a beautiful day, yes?" said Dr. Morales, beaming at the winterscape as if he had created it himself "It makes you feel like a kid, no?" "Yes," I said. "But you couldn't have had much weather like this in Cuba." "You are still at point-counterpoint, eh, Mr. Singer?" "Just an observation," I said, moving off down the path. "Sometimes a cigar is a cigar." "Yes, but not, I believe, when you light it and then try to ram it up someone's ass." He hadn't resumed walking, and when I turned to face him he looked, now, less exploratory than extraterrestrially Bolshevik, with the snow--which was intensifying again--swirling about him. He stood perfectly upright in his carapace, a few feet away, gazing at me austerely, as if I had failed to hold my individual portion of the line against the Nazis outside Leningrad. Off to the side, some schoolboys on an outing tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Dr. Morales picked up some snow, compacted it vigorously, and, encumbered as he was, fired it at the tree I'd aimed at. Bull's-eye. "I don't think this treatment is getting me anywhere," I said. "You must give it time, Mr. Singer." "I want to stop." "Please do not do that, Mr. Singer." "I thought this whole process was supposed to be more sympathetic, kinder." "That is what you want? Someone to be kind to you?" "Yes," I said, and with that, tears welled up in my eyes. "Yes, that's what I want." "I'm afraid this is not my function. What I shall try to do, if you will permit me, is to help you learn how to obtain from others what it is that you want." The tears were now starting from my eyes, as if expelled by some great interior pressure, and even as I wept I smiled in childlike pleasure to feel such sudden lightness across my shoulders, such relief in not being able to govern myself Dr. Morales walked along the path toward me. Despite what he had said, I expected that he might put his arm around my shoulders or explain that it was for my own good that he remained so aloof and exigent--some gesture of concern. But even in the face of my weeping he didn't let go an inch, and what I got, after a Frisbee player ran between us, his coat flapping and his orange scarf trailing behind him like a pennant, was "I am sorry but our time is up. I must return to my office." We walked out of the park once again in silence, and Dr. Morales once again struck a lively pace. I hurried along, in order not to lag behind like a kid, which is very much what I felt like as I tried to wipe the snot and tears from my face with the back of a snow-crusted glove. At Fifth Avenue, Dr. Morales gave me a single formal nod of the head and hurried off. He walked against a red light that was about to change, and a gypsy cab trailing the herd of cars that had just passed and driving too fast for the weather looked like it was going to hit him. I thought, My troubles are over, and then, It's all my fault, but the cab swerved away. The street was slick with snow, so the car fishtailed into a parked delivery van with a muffled thump and a treble accompaniment of tinkling glass. The van's driver, dressed in jeans and shirtsleeves, got out and shook his fist and issued an excited bulletin of chingates and pendejos and putas across the avenue, but Dr. Morales stalked on. When I got on the westbound crosstown bus, there was the fat woman, occupying two of the seats reserved for the elderly and the handicapped. Excerpted from The Treatment by Daniel Menaker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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