The Good Patient by Kristin Waterfield Duisberg

Author:Kristin Waterfield Duisberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466870987
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter 15

I never fill Robert in on the conversation he missed by going to the bathroom at the Vernons’ house, and likewise, on Wednesday, though I describe to Dr. Lindholm Tish’s irritating smugness, I neglect to go into my own behavior in response.

“Sounds like your weekend away was a lot of fun.” Dr. Lindholm rolls her eyes.

“Well, yeah,” I reply. “I mean, no. Sort of, I guess.”

“Which is it? ‘Well, yeah,’ or ‘no’?”

I consider the options. Well, yeah, is safer, but no is more honest. I’m trying to be honest, but I’m not sure I’m up for it tonight. “Can it be both?”

Dr. Lindholm smirks and runs a hand through her hair, pushing her ever-shortening bob behind her ears. “That would be ‘Sort of, I guess.’”

“Damn!” I snap my fingers in mock disappointment. “I missed that. ‘Sort of, I guess,’ it is.”

The smirk spreads into a smile. “Now that we’ve resolved that. What do you suppose it means?”

Aah, of course, what it means. The all-important question, the question Dr. Lindholm attaches to every story. It’s an interesting story, Darien, but what does it mean? I sometimes imagine she fancies herself a Zen master, a Buddhist priest serving up sound bites of inscrutable wisdom. What is the meaning, Darien, what is the meaning of the world? What is the sound of catharsis at $200 an hour? So far, I am getting good only at telling the stories. I still have a ways to go before I am good at saying what they mean.

“What what means?”

“What it means that you hated spending the weekend with a pregnant woman who couldn’t stop talking about her baby.”

“Oh, that.” I shift. “I never said hated. I don’t know. I find that much socializing—behaving—exhausting. All that hanging around other women. God”—I feel my face register revulsion—“that’s like torture to me.”

Dr. Lindholm’s face returns nothing. “Really.” She pulls her right foot under her body with her left hand. Her chair rocks precariously, back and right; she seems not to notice. “Do you not have many women friends?”

I pause to take inventory, and to consider this question’s relevance. About the only thing I can determine is that it does, in fact, have some. The blankness on Dr. Lindholm’s face is a dead giveaway, the one sign of weakness she betrays. If something is of topical or polite interest to her, her face will show it, eyebrows lifting in surprise, mouth quirking down in concern. But if something is of clinical interest, her face becomes careful, unreadable. It is a response I recognize because it’s my own. I can’t find the harm, though, the malignance in the question. “No. I don’t have any,” I say.

I think briefly of Hillary, our early camaraderie; she was about as close as it came. We’d started at Boylan at the same time, both less than two months out of college, and we’d hated each other at first. We were too much alike. Like me, Hillary had gone to an elite liberal arts college

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