Gaits of Heaven

is—and lightly streaked with blond highlights. She is almost certainly wearing a linen suit and high-heeled leather shoes. So far, I am limiting myself to facts and to near certainties. For example, I know everything about the chairs in Rita’s new office because she agonized over them. When she rented this new office on Concord Avenue, she decided that her old chairs were shabby and had to be replaced. Because she spends so much time sitting down, she had to have a chair that would protect her back from the chronic strain that is an occupational hazard of doing therapy. Or so therapists think. It’s my observation that one of the hazards of the profession is hypochondria. But maybe I’m being harsh. Still, it does seem to me that a great many therapists are valetudinarians. But to return to my knowledge of facts and near certainties, as opposed to the fantasies and reconstructions that will follow, I know about the chairs because Rita dragged me along when she shopped for them and used me as a sounding board in long debates about them. If she chose a large, imposing chair for herself and a lesser chair for the patient, wouldn’t the difference create a sense of hierarchy that Rita wanted to avoid? I said that in my layperson’s opinion, it was a good idea not to enthrone herself while making the patient feel small. My professional opinion was, of course, that a clearly defined hierarchy was an ideal arrangement, providing that the high-ranking individual was the handler rather than the dog. In fact, my goal in training was to secure for myself the position of benevolent despot. Still, many dogs find it threatening and unpleasant to have people loom over them, and I suspect that psychotherapy patients feel the same way. So, Rita ended up with identical chairs, three of them, in fact, because she sometimes treated couples, an act of madness, if you ask me. Breaking up a dog fight now and then is one thing, but voluntarily doing it all the time as a way to earn a living? With or without identical chairs, that’s just plain nuts.
    This Friday morning, however, Rita is seeing an individual patient, a woman. Having spent a great deal of time watching Rita as she listens to me, I know for certain that Rita’s expression as she listens to her patient is at once calm and alert. Rita is remarkably easy to talk to. She possesses the gift of being able to make sense of the senseless. So, Rita looks calm and alert as her patient briefly discusses the effectiveness of the medication that Dr. Quinn Youngman has prescribed for her bipolar illness.
    The patient then talks about Eumie Brainard-Green, who was her previous therapist. “I should never had confided in her. Never. That was terrible judgment on my part.”
    Rita thinks about pointing out that Eumie was, after all, the patient’s therapist, so passing along private information was perfectly appropriate. But Rita reconsiders and decides to wait before either speaking as the voice of reality or interpreting the concern about confidences as a question about the safety of confiding in Rita herself.
    “I do have an excuse,” continues the patient, “in the sense that I wasn’t on lithium, but goddamn it! That was half her fault, too. One hundred percent, she recast everything about me as trauma. One hundred percent.”
    Rita refrains from informing the angry patient that the emotion she feels is anger. Instead, she says, “I wonder whether it might be useful to take a moment to look at things from her point of view. How she might have viewed you and your situation.”
    “Clever, aren’t you? Well, yes, okay, that’s how she really saw it. She didn’t say to herself, well, here’s a bipolar person who needs lithium, but I’ll try to fool her into thinking she’s been traumatized. Oh, okay. She was perfectly genuine. Not too bright. And wrong. But genuine. And that’s why I told her things I wish I hadn’t. That’s why I trusted her.“
    “I’m wondering whether there’s anything else. Anything in addition to your bipolar disorder. Maybe something else that you sense was missed. Or misread.”
    After a moment of silence, the patient says, “Yes, she could’ve realized that sooner or later, I’d hear about her husband’s book, and I’d hear the rumors about it. She knew the contacts I have. It should’ve crossed her mind that I was one patient she should’ve shut up about. That I’m not the kind of person who wants to end up half disguised in