love as a teenager, the sensation of adoring someone for reasons I couldn’t articulate and of craving her physical presence. Laura Kendrick had been her name, and it had lasted a year. As I sat there, I thought of Laura, now married with two kids, and smiled to myself.
“What?” Anna said. I hadn’t noticed her looking at me.
“Nothing.”
The sad thing was that it didn’t remind me of Rebecca. I’d been fond of her, admired her, even loved her, but I had never craved her in that desperate, chemical way. There were things I’d always kept from her, and I’d felt guilty that she cherished me so much.
I’d been having a recurrent dream about Rebecca. I was on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, standing next to my mother and seeing her gray hair and her soft, kind face. We were talking-I didn’t know what about, but it made me happy. Then I glanced up the steps and saw Rebecca wearing a summer dress. “Come on,” I said to my mother, and we set off after her. We couldn’t find her inside, and we started hunting through galleries, my mother now leading the way. Then we came to a gallery where there was a party, with a crowd of people drinking champagne around a painting.
I walked up to the painting and saw that it was a nude of a woman lying on a sofa. She was beautiful, and I reached forward and felt one of her breasts, which was soft and warm to my touch. Then my mother called to me, pointing toward a window through which Rebecca had climbed. I saw that Rebecca had scrambled down a rope into Central Park and was running across the grass to a clump of trees.
“Becca!” I shouted, but she didn’t turn round.
That was how the dream ended.
We’d met at Episcopal two years after I’d arrived in New York, so my mother had never known her. I’d always believed they’d have got on well-both of them were sweet and loyal. On our first date, she told me I was different from the other shrinks, which I took as a compliment. We were sitting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, one of those Italian spots that are institutions, although they don’t deserve it anymore. I spent most of the meal enjoying her presence, and as we left, she turned to me to be kissed.
I’d chosen psychiatry despite the questions it raises. They screen for a degree of empathy when they admit you to medical school: they don’t want scientists who can’t talk to other people. But the competitive spots are for cardiology, radiology, or ear, nose, and throat, the entry point to plastic surgery-anything that involves expensive procedures and minimal chat. Other residents suspected the psychs of being lazy or crazy. Lazy because psychiatry involves little night work apart from emergency shifts. Crazy because many were drawn to it by some affinity with their patients. Either they were odd themselves-working out an inner demon by finding one in others-or they had a family history. Guilty on both counts.
After a while, with no sign of Anna wanting to break the silence, I did. I was puzzled by what she was doing in East Hampton, especially given her skepticism about the place. It didn’t appear to be her natural habitat.
“How come you work for the Shapiros?” I asked.
“How long have you got?”
“Until we reach the city, I guess.”
“It shouldn’t take that long. Let’s see. Grew up, went to liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Very pleased with itself, but I thought it was kind of crappy. I came to New York, got a job as an assistant to a magazine editor, and turned out to be good at that, weirdly good.”
“That’s great.” I noticed that she’d taken one open-ended question and given me a brief rundown of her entire adult life.
“Except I was working so hard, really hard, and holding myself to such an insanely high standard that I started to go a bit nuts. I was having panic attacks in my cubicle, sweating and freaking out.”
“Did you seek treatment?”
“I took drugs. They calmed me down a bit, but I knew by then that I wasn’t happy, so I quit.”
“That was brave.”
“Brave, reckless, stupid-all the things I’ve always been. Anyway, I thought I could teach yoga instead, so I took a course. That’s how Nora found me. I was covering a class for a friend at the Ninety-second Street Y and she came along. It went from there. Now I’m everything-housekeeper, cook, indentured servant. My job is to make things easy, whatever that takes.” Her voice was lightly satirical, but I heard a note of bitterness.
“What are they like to work for?”
She turned her attention from me to check her mirror and merge onto the Long Island Expressway. We passed low pine forests on either side as we headed into the city. She overtook two trucks and then, pulling into the right-hand lane, answered my question as if she’d been considering it since I’d asked.
“Nora’s great. I love her and she treats me like family. It’s almost too cozy with her sometimes.”
“And Mr. Shapiro?”
“Harry’s fine,” she said tonelessly. “Anyway, you know all about me now. What about you?”
There was a glint in her eyes as she looked at me. She seemed to find me entertaining, which was a start.
“What do you want to know?”
“Okay, you’re a psychiatrist, right? Nora says you’re treating Harry.”
“I can’t talk about that, I’m afraid.” Even as I said it, it sounded stiff and ponderous, and I wished I didn’t have to rebuff her.
“Wife, children?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Can we change the subject?”
Anna grinned. “Why? That’s all my therapist wanted to talk about, my old boyfriend. Him and my childhood and whether I was seeking a father figure. Nathan would have been a terrible choice if I had been.”
“So you’ve seen a therapist?”
“I admit it.”
“And you had a boyfriend?”
She laughed, giving me an amused glance that made me feel good, but then stopped talking as we passed under bridges with ragged American flags fixed to them in memory of soldiers who’d died in Iraq. When she spoke again, she was quieter.
“He was borderline, my therapist reckoned. He hooked me, and then made me suffer for loving him. I would have talked about it forever, but I had to stop in the end. You guys charge a lot for a forty-five-minute chat. You know why I really ended it, though? One day I was listening to myself talking and I thought:
“Were you?”
“No, but I might have been, right? He’d listen to me each week and take everything I said seriously and try to find a meaning in it, but how did he know any of it was true? He thought he needed to make me feel good-explain away everything I’d done as a reaction to my past or something. I could have been a terrible person. He wouldn’t have known.”
“You’re
“I don’t know. Honesty matters to me. I’ve always got into trouble for trying to tell the truth. People think I’m just a bitch. Maybe I am. Anyway, I didn’t think he could keep me honest, so I stopped.”
She laughed sheepishly, as if she had given away more about herself than she had intended. Dusk was falling and taillights were glowing in a red line ahead of us as we passed the big-box stores and projects of Queens. The vehicles around us gradually adopted New York driving habits and started to weave in and out of the lanes, making her curse softly. We popped into the Midtown Tunnel and out onto the city streets. I’d done that swift border crossing a dozen times, but it always surprised me. Despite my halfhearted protests, she drove down Lexington and around Gramercy Park to deposit me on Irving Place by my apartment building.
“Bye,” I said, holding out my hand as she idled the Range Rover at the curb.
She grasped it and gave it a satirical tug, as if I were being absurdly formal. Then she pulled out a scrap of
