Gaits of Heaven

one, I’d have left it in the drive; it would never have occurred to me to steal a computer game, a movie, a music album, or a software program. Close inspection, however, showed me that the drive held the same brand of CD I used when I backed up documents. My only excuse for what I did is that the absence of appropriate boundaries somehow infected or seduced me. That’s no excuse, really, and I don’t want to add to my list of transgressions by lying or whitewashing. Let me just spit this out: when no one was looking, I slipped the disc out of the drive and into my jacket pocket. I wanted to know what Wyeth was up to.
     

CHAPTER 34
     
    Of the many sneaky psychotherapeutic distinctions that Rita is always trying to slip past me, the most galling is the supposed difference between what she calls historical truth and psychological truth. By historical truth , she means what I call truth plain and simple, or sometimes tortuous and complex, but truth nonetheless, in other words, the facts of what really happened. Rita, however, does not call it truth plain and simple. Worse, she is alarmingly inclined to demean and dismiss it and even to cast doubt on its very existence. In contrast, she places a high value on psychological truth, which in my opinion refers to the imaginative and inevitably distorted reconstruction that all of us have to make do with when truth itself, real truth, is unavailable. Whenever Rita and I get into an argument about truth, she always ends up saying, “Well, it’s a good thing that you’re not a psychotherapist!” On that point, we agree.
    So, since I’m not a psychotherapist, thank heaven, I have to preface the following by stating that since a transcript of Rita’s phone conversation with Peter York is nonexistent and therefore unavailable to me, I am reluctantly settling for the most accurate version of their exchange that I’m able to reconstruct.
    Fact: at about the time I was filching the disc from Wyeth’s computer, Peter York calls his supervisor, Rita, to consult with her about a patient of his who is in a crisis. The patient is, of course, Wyeth, who has called his therapist, Peter, from his cell phone to say that he almost killed his father and is now wandering the streets of Cambridge with nowhere to go.
    Rita calmly asks Peter what he said to Wyeth. Peter, it emerges, told Wyeth to go to his mother’s house. Peter expresses his concern about the boy’s potential for violence, both intentional and unintentional. Remarkably, or so it might seem, Rita’s response is more practical than psychological: assuring the boy’s physical safety comes first; Peter must maintain contact with Wyeth until the situation is stable. “He’ll probably go to his mother’s,” she says.
    She then asks what precipitated the crisis. After listening closely, she says, “Okay, the father makes a sudden unilateral change in the rules. Until tonight, the rule was that sooner or later, Wyeth got anything he wanted. Then all of a sudden, with no negotiation and no real warning, the father said no. And apparently meant it. There was obviously a need to modify the old rule, but with an adolescent, there has to be negotiation. The son needs to participate in the process and not just have this radical change sprung on him.”
    After again listening, Rita says, “Frank Farmer. Yes, I agree. They’re his speciality—these families with individual therapists and couples therapists, and everyone’s on meds, and everyone’s acting out, yes. When it comes to impossible families, he’s the court of last resort. He’s a legend. But Frank may not be willing to see these people.” She listens and then replies, “Okay, I could run it by him. He might do it for me. But in the meantime, see if the son is at the mother’s by now. And then you’re going to need to see the father and son together. If the rules are changing, the two of them need to work on how that happens.”
     

CHAPTER 35
     
    When Steve, Leah, Caprice, and I returned home, Rita was in the yard, where she was talking on her cell phone and letting Willie, her Scottie, run around. Leah and Caprice went upstairs to watch a video. I felt like going to bed, snuggling up between Steve and a couple of dogs, and losing myself in a novel written before the invention of computers, psychotherapy, twelve-step programs, or cell phones. Pride and Prejudice. The Moonstone. Our Mutual Friend.
    As it was, our dogs needed their evening outing, and