LITMIR.BIZ

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      She shook her head in disbelief.

      “Inappropriate, eh?”

      “You’ve got three months, habibi.”

      In my office, I leaned back in my desk chair and gingerly inched my feet onto the top of the desk, careful not to dislodge the mountains of haphazardly piled charts. I took off my glasses and wearily rubbed my eyes. The Chagall was marginally more tolerable as a formless splash of color. But returning the glasses to my nose, the floating lovers came back into focus, their smitten grins as irritating as ever. I picked a rubber band off the desk and flipped it across the room, missing by a good meter the woman’s upside-down breasts. What was the harm in a dartboard? I would now be reduced to shooting rubber bands like a sixth-grade boy, flipping paper clips, tossing pushpins at random targets in the room. It was an elemental male impulse, this ejaculatory thrust into the world, but what would that castrating witch know about that.

      Appealing to my national duty—that was the last straw. Immigrants could be insufferable in that way. Most of them hadn’t even served in the army. I had already done enough for my esteemed country, rooting out terrorists in the alleys of Ramallah. Did she really believe that providing efficient mental health services meant a damn when every bus and market and café was a target for a suicide bomb? What difference could it possibly make to the national psyche if one bored psychologist took out some of his frustrations with a dartboard?

      She was right about one thing—the country was changing, and fast. It was becoming a big corporation, swallowing up the little mom-and-pop store it had been just a few years ago. People were enthusiastically pursuing the Israeli version of the American dream, throwing around words like “productivity” and “accountability,” smiling polite little smiles, saying “Have a nice day” while suing each other into bankruptcy. In the old Israel, people would growl at you on the street but you could trust them with uncounted money. In the old Israel, your lunch hour could stretch into a long, lazy afternoon and no one would ever notice or care.

      I randomly picked a chart out of one of the piles and glanced at the name. Havah Ashkenazi. Who the hell was that? Was I really supposed to make up years’ worth of sessions and treatment plans out of whole cloth?

      Nava would gloat if she heard about my probation. It was beyond me why this latest incident with Dina had set her off like that. It had all been a misunderstanding—I wouldn’t really have seduced that innocent young thing. Not that it hadn’t crossed my mind, but it had been nothing more than idle fantasy. Anyway, it was impossible to be a man in this field and not play around a bit. The patients were almost exclusively female, all of them hungry for some comforting male attention. Sure, there were psychiatrists, with their mind-numbing drugs; but I was the sensitive therapist, and all I had to do was stroke my chin thoughtfully and it made these women melt. It wasn’t such a big deal—they were frivolous rolls on the therapy couch. I shouldn’t have gotten so brazen, staying out to all hours on flimsy excuses. But I was a good father and provider, never took those flings seriously. Did none of that matter to Nava? And to bar me, now, from my daughter’s bat mitzvah party? What had snapped in her that she could toss me, so thoroughly and unceremoniously, out the door?

      I flung a paper clip at the doorknob and was rewarded with a satisfying ping. I stared at the upside-down lovers in the Chagall reproduction and felt another surge of hatred for the painting. I imagined coming in one day to find the weightless lovers fallen and crashed to the pavement.

      The telephone made me jump.

      “Dr. Benami, your 12:00 patient is here.”

      What the hell was that about? I never scheduled a patient at 12:00. I had already missed my squash game and hadn’t had a bite of lunch.

      “Are you sure it’s for me?”

      “Oh, yes. We’ve been told to schedule you in more tightly. Didn’t you check the day’s appointments?” Her voice was thick with sarcasm.

      “Well, no. Who is it?”

      “Penina Mizrachi.”

      The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place her.

      “Tell her I’m running a little late. Tell her it will be at least a half hour.”

      A long, accusatory silence preceded the frigid reply. “I’ll let her know.”

      I stared helplessly at the mounds of dog-eared charts for a few seconds, then angrily flipped another rubber band across the room. I had been aiming at the doorknob again but hit the lamp by the side of the couch instead, making it totter on its base. What if I broke a few things in this sterile, hospital-neat office? Without my dartboard, the office would now be littered with the detritus of my office supply requisitions, and the cleaning lady could add her lilting, Arabic soprano to the choir of voices singing out for my dismissal.

      But didn’t I have a goddamned right to eat lunch? I made sure the receptionist was absorbed in conversation with a patient before summoning up a forced nonchalance and sauntering out of my office. I pretended to casually check the papers in my mailbox, then took a beeline out the waiting room to the stairwell beyond.

      3

      When I returned to the office, I found a fuming Penina Mizrachi beached outside my door. I suggested to Penina, who I now remembered as the fat woman with the garishly dyed and braided hair, that we reschedule for another day, but she would have none of it. Once in my office, she perched on the edge of the patient’s couch, clutching her oversized handbag in her lap, and launched into a long, whiny complaint about the ways in which I—like her husband, grown children, and a random assortment of neighbors—didn’t afford her the respect she was due. She had been on time for her appointment, as she always was, and had seen me ever-so-casually slip out of the waiting room. Why was her time not as important as mine? I might have answered that she, unlike even minimally functioning people like myself, had no job and no schedule to keep, and what difference did it make if she spent her time in our waiting room or sunk in her couch staring at celebrity talk shows? But I held my tongue and watched her substantial bosom heave up and down with the weight of her lot, wondering at the effort and expense and poor judgment that had culminated in her odd coiffure, listening intently to the squeaking sound her breath made on the rare occasions when she took a chance and paused. She needn’t have bothered, as I had no intention of interrupting her numbing monologue. Long ago she had married a man who was unabashedly in love with another woman and had kept the affair going through all the years of their marriage. Saddled with a slew of unruly kids, she had never had the confidence or self-respect to walk out on him. Listening to her, I found myself longing for Nava, thinking about her lithe body and ropy neck, the proud way she angled her head in public. Nava had dignity, self-respect—she wouldn’t put up forever with a no-good philanderer. I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of loss. What had I been thinking? Nava was nothing like this pathetic specimen, this Penina Mizrachi, who had let herself grow fat and lazy and reconciled to a lifetime of neglect and humiliation. I held tight to my rising grief, my face frozen into concerned listening mode, my sympathetic grunts modulating to the wavelike heaving of Penina’s chronic, languishing despair.

      When the session was over, I watched her dutifully get in line at the reception desk to confirm her next visit. I had barely heard a word she had said, yet she was visibly calmer. Was she really so lonely that even this pretense of caring companionship made her life more bearable? I rummaged through the piles on my desk for her long out-of-date chart, then stared at it a while, wondering what I could possibly write about this session. “Patient continues to have symptoms of depression and anxiety. Patient continues to feel unappreciated and unloved. Patient continues to lead a useless, pathetic life. Patient continues to bore husband, children, and therapist to distraction.” I tossed the chart onto the floor in disgust.

      The afternoon dragged on, patient after desperate patient. Jezebel was right that the intifada was causing a dramatic increase in the demand for our services, but I wasn’t nearly as confident as she was that our role in the midst of this social dysfunction was entirely benevolent. Yes, we could sometimes provide superficial relief through medications, or even therapy, but weren’t

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