Twisted

the business of helping patients with their mental and emotional problems—oh, he was a natural-born therapist. None better. What he hated was practicing Upper East Side psychiatry. It had been the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. But in his second year of Columbia Medical School the tall, handsome student met the tall, beautiful assistant development director of the Museum of Modern Art. Harry and Linda were married before he started his internship. He moved out of his fifth-floor walk-up near Harlem and into her town house on East Eighty-first. Within weeks she’d begun changing his life. Linda was a woman who had high aspirations for her man (very similar to Patsy, in whose offhand comment several weeks ago about her husband’s lack of ambition Harry had seen reams of anger). Linda wanted money, she wanted to be on the regulars list for benefits at the Met, she wanted to be pampered at four-star restaurants in Eze and Monaco and Paris.
    A studious, easygoing man from a modest suburb of New York, Harry knew that by listening to Linda he was headed in the wrong direction. But he was in love with her so he continued to listen. They bought aco-op in a high-rise on Madison Avenue and he hung up his shingle (well, a heavy, brass plaque) outside this three-thousand-dollar-a-month office on Park and Seventy-eighth.
    At first Harry had worried about the astronomical bills they were amassing. But soon the money was flowing in. He had no trouble getting business; there’s no lack of neuroses among the rich, and the insured, on the isle of Manhattan. He was also very good at what he did. His patients came and they liked him and so they returned weekly.
    “Nobody understands me sure we’ve got money but money isn’t everything and the other day my housekeeper looks at me like I’m from outer space and it’s not my fault and I get so angry when my mother wants to go shopping on my one day off and I think Samuel’s seeing someone and I think my son’s gay and I just cannot lose these fifteen pounds . . .”
    Their troubles may have been plebeian, even laughably minor at times, but his oath, as well as his character, wouldn’t let Harry minimize them. He worked hard to help his patients.
    And all the while he neglected what he really wanted to do. Which was to treat severe mental cases. People who were paranoid schizophrenics, people with bipolar depression and borderline personalities—people who led sorrowful lives and couldn’t hide from that sorrow with the money that Harry’s patients had.
    From time to time he had volunteered at various clinics—particularly a small one in Brooklyn that treated homeless men and women—but with his Park Avenue caseload and his wife’s regimen of socialobligations, there had been no way he could devote much time to the clinic. He’d wrestled with the thought of just chucking his Park Avenue practice. Of course, if he’d done that, his income would have dropped by ninety percent. He and Linda had had two children a couple of years after they’d gotten married—two sweet daughters Harry loved very much—and their needs, very expensive needs, private school sorts of needs, had taken priority over his personal contentment. Besides, as idealistic as he was in many ways, Harry had known that Linda would leave him in a flash if he’d started working full-time in Brooklyn.
    But the irony was that even after Linda did leave him—for someone she’d met at one of the society benefits that Harry couldn’t bear to attend—he hadn’t been able to spend any more time at the clinic than he had when he’d been married. The debts Linda had run up while they were married were excruciating. His older daughter was in an expensive college and his younger was on her way to Vassar next year.
    Yet, out of the dozens of patients who whined about minor dissatisfactions, here came Patsy Randolph, a truly desperate patient: a woman telling him about ghosts, about her husband trying to drive her insane, a woman clearly on the brink.
    A patient, at last, who would give Harry a chance to redeem his life.
    That night he didn’t bother with dinner. He came home and went straight into his den, where sat stacked in high piles a year’s worth of the professional journals that he’d never bothered to read since they dealt with serious psychiatric issues and didn’tmuch affect the patients in his practice. He kicked his shoes off and began sifting through them, taking notes. He found