I did not do it. My hand had already opened the envelope and withdrawn from it a single sheet of graph paper torn from a notebook. On the sheet, written out in the same painstaking block characters, was—what was it?—a sort of list, an itemization? An itinerary? The steps in a sequence? No, it was none of these. It was a poem. Before I read it, I knew it, what it was, what it said. I knew how it ended.
Jessica Burke had mentioned the poem in passing, in a session. Someone had shown her a copy, or she had been assigned it in a night school class she was taking. The course had been her favorite, and she was hoping to reenroll in school, full-time if the administration would permit it. She had seemed excited, happy: if it was spring, soon it would be fall. “New pencils! New erasers! New lunch box!” she said, half ironically. Maybe it was not too late to enroll for the fall semester. If she could “throw herself on the dean’s mercy,” maybe it was not too late after all, not too late!
This was her plan. The very fact that she had formulated a plan at all seemed to me a sign of progress; perhaps the familiar fog had lifted from the terrain of her future. I could hear the change in her voice, in the sessions and even outside my office in the lobby if she arrived early enough to chat with Itzal, the doorman.
“You watch, Itsy,” I heard her say. “I’m going to do it. I’ll bet you a million dollars.”
I couldn’t hear Itzal’s response, no doubt something about how betting tempts the devil, or perhaps he merely shrugged, his shoulders lifting somewhere in the ill-hung spaces of his doorman’s coat, gaunt cheeks creased in a dry, inverted smile, as though to say: “Everything is possible.”
It was the happiness of possibility, an infectious happiness, how the spring sunlight struck its frank spring shape on my office wall. Though I continued to work with her as I always had, I think now that my interpretations must have felt warmer to her: Yes you are now able to feel a new excitement for a future, for your new course, yes you no longer want to be somewhere else, to be someone else. For surely I felt it too, that possibility of which spring itself seemed the guarantor, the sunlit patch on the wall like a tacked-up handbill announcing a new act in town.
The poem I was holding in the post office, she had asked, in passing, Do you know it? It had been just so great, she’d said, just to talk about books in class again, just to talk about books. She’d just gotten her first essay assignment, to write about a poem, this poem by Yeets, no, not Yeets, Yeats….Did I know it? I was obviously a literate guy, with all the books I had in my office….Do you know it? she had asked, then without waiting for an answer, going on to say that it was a fairy poem, about how the fairies lure some child away from his familiar world, saying the world is more full of weeping that he can understand. That poem, she said, do you know it?
I had answered with natural honesty: Yes, I know it, I said. I know it well. But to have said so, to have answered her question, however truthfully, however spontaneously, was an error for an analyst, a technical misstep. Immediately I was aware of this, and of the need to regain my footing. Such a concept of error is foreign to those who have never practiced or undergone psychoanalysis, as is the idea that the analyst should disclose nothing of himself. In a well-conducted session, however, everything depends upon that abstinence. I should have said instead: What would it mean to you if I knew it? Or: You want us both to know something together. You would like to have a new kind of conversation with me, about a thing we could share. I should have said something like that, because even in her passing remark she had turned the poem into a kind of gift, and it is axiomatic to my trade that every gift conceals a squadron of vigilant desires and dissembled meanings. Here, she had in effect said, here is something I like. I want you to have it too. I want to oblige you with something in common. I want you to be obliged.
On the other hand, the lapse was minor, a hairline scratch in the reflective surface of the analysis, a surface inevitably chipped and scraped in the course of daily sessions, even while the gentle, repetitive friction of the sessions works in time to restore that surface’s mirroring sheen. In any event, she had paused only briefly, and having registered my misstep, I had to turn my attention back to the stream of her speech. I never thought about it again until that moment in the glare and hubbub of the post office. At that moment, however, a conviction surged through me, not as an idea but as a jolt of current: Jessica Burke had sent me this letter. It was she who had sent it, and it was she who had leased the box in my name and mailed me the key. I knew then what she had meant for me to know, holding there what she had meant for me to hold. And I knew that it
