Hit Man

times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”
    “You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s . . . look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”
    “Maybe I’m interested,” he said.
    Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but—
    “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”
    He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”
    “Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.
    Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”
    “Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.
    “I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”
    “This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”
    “Well,” Keller said.
    “Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. If you have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”
    “That’s fair,” Keller said.
    He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.
    No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”
    “Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”
    It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.
    “Be right out,” he said.
    He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wrap-around porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.
    “The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”
    He went upstairs, and forty minutes later he came down again. A young man named Louis drove him back to the station, and on the way they chatted about a recent boxing match they’d both seen on ESPN. “What I wish,” Louis said, “I wish they had like a mute button on the remote, except what it would do is it would mute the announcers but you’d still hear the crowd noise and the punches landing. What you wouldn’t have is the constant yammer-yammer-yammer in your ear.” Keller wondered if they could do that. “I don’t see why not,” Louis said. “They can do everything else. If you can put a man