May We Be Forgiven

desk—the sample from a drug company. Tuttle is a short, thin fellow, prematurely hunched—the top of his head comes to a kind of a shiny point, absent of hair but for a ring of yellow fringe that goes all the way around and is longer than the fashion. He wears horn-rimmed glasses, which he edges higher by repeatedly wrinkling his nose. The office has the same metal blinds as the waiting room and would be dark but for the afternoon sun reflecting off the cars parked outside.
    “Have a seat,” Tuttle says, directing me towards a worn sofa.
    I look past Tuttle; clear plastic cups from Smoothie King are in an even row on the edge of his desk, each less than a quarter full, one yellow, one pink, one purple. Mango, strawberry, and berry-berry lined up like some kind of experiment. There’s a half-empty old five-cent gumball machine filled with what look like greasy peanuts and piles of used legal pads. An air conditioner hums noisily.
    “First let me get a little information: name, address, phone?”
    I give him the details.
    “Employer?”
    “Self,” I say for the first time.
    “Insurance? I don’t take insurance, but I’ll give you a bill each time we meet and you can submit it. The initial meeting is five hundred and runs for an hour, and subsequent visits are forty-five minutes and the charge is two fifty. I am a psychiatrist, not a social worker, not a psychologist.” He looks at me carefully. The glasses seem to be magnifiers—his eyes look enormous. “What medications do you currently take? Previous hospitalizations?”
    I mention the stroke.
    “Do you have a diagnosis that you are familiar with? And/or how has your condition been described to you? What was the referring agency?”
    “A girl at Social Services gave me your name,” I say, thinking that something here is not entirely on the mark.
    “Do you require court-ordered drug testing—i.e., do I have to watch you pee?”
    “No,” I say.
    “Good,” he says. “When I watch someone else pee it makes me feel like I have to pee. In fact, I usually get one of the employees from Smoothie King to do the watching. I tap one of the guys to follow us into the toilet, and I tip him a few bucks to do the watching. I really don’t want to see a patient’s water works and then have to talk to him about what he’s like with his wife. Plus, I happen to know the bathrooms are monitored—so there’s very little chance of the patient trying to get away with anything. But I digress, and this isn’t about me, and this isn’t about Smoothies. What can I do for you?” He puts his pad down, crosses his legs, and looks at me, again wrinkling his nose and lifting the glasses up a little.
    “I think I’d like to begin by asking, what kind of people do you typically work with?”
    “Spans the gamut, from court-ordered counseling for boys who get into trouble, to anger-management issues with married men, a few middle-aged ladies who wished they’d done things differently, and a good number of teenage girls who want to be dead. What brings you here?”
    “I’ve applied to be a foster parent and I need a psychiatric evaluation.” I hand him the form. “You were among those recommended by the Department of Social Services.”
    He takes the form and looks at it as though he’s never seen one before.
    “It would be a directed placement of a little boy with some learning problems who was recently orphaned.”
    “Have you ever been arrested?”
    “No.”
    “Do you enjoy pornography?”
    “Not especially,” I say. “But there is something,” I say, laying the groundwork. I tell him about George. He listens carefully, appearing never to have heard any of it before. Either he doesn’t read the papers or he’s very good at concealing what he knows.
    “Let him cast the first stone …” the doctor says, when I come clean about my part in the domestic debacle. “And so, before all this, before last Thanks-giving, you led a conventional life, no affairs, no relationships outside the marriage?”
    “A most conventional life,” I said.
    “And the children?” he asks.
    I tell him how I have come to know the children, how they are so much more interesting than I had expected, and that I love them. I share the details of our Williamsburg adventure.
    “And are you in a sexual relationship now?” he asks.
    “Yes, with a local girl, very nice family,” I say, as if bragging.
    He shrugs as if to say, How would you know? “Okay, so this boy Ricardo