Hit Man - Lawrence Block [21]
It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.
One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”
“Is that bad?”
“Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”
“You think I need to be in therapy?”
“I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”
“Mostly free weights.”
“Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”
“I do it to stay in shape.”
“And because it makes you feel good.”
“So?”
“So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”
“That was only a couple of 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