WAS 25 YEARS OLD, SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON A COUCH, UNABLE TO STOP my foot from wagging. My new therapist sat ten feet across from me, his middle-aged girth swallowed up in a high-backed leather chair, masculine: thick wrists, the wide beige band of his watch, receding silver hair, pale, freckled skin. Tortoiseshell glasses obscured the blue in his close-set eyes. In one of those weird associations the mind makes, when I looked at his face I thought immediately of Bert Lahr, the way his thin lips curled into what might be a smile. Outside that office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, barely audible over the low rattle of a window AC unit and the whir of the requisite white-noise machine, I heard snatches of sidewalk conversation, the din of a car-stereo bass, the faint of a truck backing up.
