LITMIR.BIZ

      Unlike Howard, Allison Forsyth was always late to session. She was late for everything, a habit she knew most people perceived as wealthy arrogance. And Allison did have a staggering mound of money. The exact number of millions her oilman grandfather had stashed away for her in various trusts and limited partnerships was a matter of perpetual debate in the tight social circles of Alamo Heights. But it wasn’t just her net worth that made others resent her. It was her bearing, a distracted aloofness that people read as a refusal to be bothered with life’s ordinary concerns.

      Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I understood that her depression made her move as if under water. Some days I’d watch her from my window as she sat slumped in her Range Rover, summoning the energy to pull her ninety-eight pounds up my stairs. Once moving, she’d hug close to her dusty vehicle, to the fence, to my building, her feet scraping along the flagstones. Hers wasn’t a runway walk, but that of someone who feared losing contact with earth.

      Like Howard though, Allison had come for analysis because of marital problems. Her husband Travis Forsyth, a pit bull of a litigation attorney, had one day—out of the blue, from Allison’s perspective—declared himself fed up with her complaining, packed up his ten-piece set of monogrammed leather luggage and moved to a rejuvenated downtown apartment in the historic Majestic Theater building. Allison was undone. She’d assumed Travis had married her for money and had banked on his greed for her security.

      Allison had made a meek eleven-minutes-late entrance the day after Howard’s memorial service and proceeded to lie on my couch as if in a coffin, eyes closed, shrouded in her trademark shapeless dress—this one a print of tiny blue roses. As usual, she seemed to have gone out of her way to be unattractive. She was thirty-five, passed for fifty, never wore makeup or styled her limp blonde hair. I spent sessions making her over in my mind, imagining how pretty she could be if she took care of herself.

      For most of the three-plus years we’d worked together, Allison had complained that my “stingy forty-five-minute appointments” were too short for an adequate detailing of the pain wrought by Travis’ betrayal. In the beginning, I’d felt sympathetic. I had no reason to doubt that Travis was a cad. I’d seen him once or twice and found him good-looking in that hair-combed-straight-back, luxury-used-car-salesman kind of way. Certainly he seemed to possess all of the calculating confidence that his wife lacked. But as time went on, it became clear that Allison was a whiner of magnificent proportion. Our sessions became the repository of all shades of that darkness, from gray mopiness to black despair—especially after Travis began making the rounds with a bounteous supply of women (every one of them beautiful, of course, or at least well done-up), women that my patient tearfully referred to as “Travy’s professional bimbos.”

      In the weeks preceding Howard’s death, however, Allison’s pattern had shifted from this non-stop complaining to a clock-stopping silence that gave me an overwhelming impulse to fidget.

      “You’re quiet again today,” I said, after what seemed like an eternity.

      “I don’t know why,” Allison said. “Maybe I’ve already told you everything.” Her eyes and mouth resumed the closed position.

      I was restless, itching to make a grocery list, just to have something to do. No paper at hand, I settled for penciling the coming week’s schedule into my date book, only to give that up when Allison, perhaps having heard the soft scratch of lead, shifted position. At that point, I’d been with her for all of five minutes.

      “You won’t believe this,” she said then, probably sensing my impatience.

      Ideally, I’d have explored this comment in a deeper way, wondered with her why she chose those particular words when she might as well have employed Wait until I tell you or Fasten your seatbelt or any number of other introductions. An analyst knows to attend to the exact word used, to the unique choice of phrase. And she said, You won’t believe. She made believing the issue. I should have gone after the transference—the experience she was having of me—with a question like, What about this idea that I wouldn’t believe you?

      Instead, I stayed on the surface. “What won’t I believe?”

      “It’s such a small thing,” she said. “Last Friday, I was sitting on my porch with a glass of straight lemonade.” Allison had wisely given up alcohol when Travis added custody considerations to his list of threats. Far from disappearing after moving out—as Allison feared he would—he made a habit of calling several times a day (or having his secretary call, if he was in trial) with various promises on the themes of divorcing her, cashing in his prenuptial and taking his rightful place as San Antonio’s most desired bachelor. “Anyway, the sun was setting. Abigail and Travis Junior were in the pool. I had this moment of…” She paused for a good ten seconds. “Happiness.” She choked as she said it.

      And happiness was certainly the last word I expected to come out of her mouth. Despair. Grief. Terror. Numbness. All of those words had floated through my mind in that preceding silence. But happiness? There was no place in my mental model of Allison for this concept.

      “What happened then?” I asked.

      Again, better psychoanalytic technique would have dictated staying with the feeling, being curious about this uncharacteristic joy of hers. But I didn’t go that direction. Why another lapse of the analytic focus? Of course, I would have been preoccupied on some level by my patient’s death, prone—like Howard himself would do—to concentrate on facts to avoid feelings. But almost certainly, it was a deeper issue: a countertransference, a distortion of my analyst-psyche by my own bullshit. Was I unconsciously resistant to hearing about an emotional state that I was far from having in my own life? What I remember telling myself was that I’d finally made her better. As pathetic as it sounds, after Howard’s death, I probably needed to give myself some small pat on the back.

      “What happened is that I froze,” she said, in answer to my question. “Then I felt like I was floating off into space.”

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