Breakable You by Brian Morton

that your client is speaking; when random thoughts stray across your mind, you must not let them distract you. Yet at the same time, you need to pay attention to the random thoughts, because sometimes they aren't random: sometimes they can give you the key to a deeper understanding of the person you're listening to. At the same time as you need to "be here now," you need to remember everything your client has told you in the past; and you need to remember as much as you can about comparable situations that other clients and other people you know have been in; and you need to remember everything you learned in your training. You need to forget the world and you need to have the world in the room with you.
    She was like an acolyte of listening; it was a passion that she pursued with a religious intensity. She hadn't written anything, hadn't added anything to the literature of psychology; she hadn't come up with any groundbreaking theories, or any theories at all. She had been an ordinary working therapist, nothing more. But though her professional life had been smaller than she had expected it to be, she sometimes thought that she had fulfilled herself to the limits of her gifts, and that that was enough.
    One reason she had never made much of a living at her trade was that she simply couldn't work with too many clients in a single day. She could handle four clients in an eight-hour day, perhaps five. After that, she was too tired. She kept several blouses in the closet of her office because sometimes the sheer effort of listening would leave her soaked with sweat.
    "The thought of staying with him scares me. But the thought of leaving him doesn't make me happy either. We have so much together. And the thought of starting off again with another man… the thought of trying to learn to
trust
another man… I talked to my brother on the phone the other day and he said I should come out to New Jersey and stay with him for a while. He's just about the only man I
do
trust. But I don't think I trust his girlfriend."
    In the six months they'd been working together, Jenny had avoided the subject of her own past. She had told Eleanor about the years she had spent in some sort of religious community in Oregon, but she'd never gone back much further than that. She referred to her father only with dismissive jokes, and when she talked about her mother, she talked in such an exaggerated way about how much she loved her that it was clear there was trouble there.
    Eleanor believed that Jenny would eventually wish to explore her own past. She worked her questions through very slowly, but she seemed to be committed to working them through.
    "And meanwhile," Jenny said, "I don't know if Nick has any idea what's going on inside me. The one-year anniversary is coming up, and I don't know if he's been thinking about it or if he just senses it, but he's being sweeter to me than he's ever been before. And I start to think, 'He behaved horribly, but he's a good man, and I've got to get over this.' And then we'll be walking down Broadway and I'll catch him staring at some bimbo, and I think I should just walk away from him on the spot."
    Eleanor didn't feel sure about what would become of Jenny and Nick. She had a hunch that they would keep going, and that things would get better between them. Nick, from Jenny's account, seemed genuinely to want to grow, and to grow within the relationship. Eleanor's impression was that he was just as Jenny had described him: a good man who had behaved badly. But Eleanor wouldn't say this. She didn't want to give advice, and if she said it, it would be a piece of advice masquerading as a description.
    There were about two minutes left in their session.
    "There's one thing that scares me, though," Jenny said. "We still have sex once in a while, you know, and I keep getting this urge to throw my diaphragm away. Like, put it in, but then go to the bathroom and take it out again. Not because I want to have a baby right now.