Breakable You by Brian Morton Page A

I think it would be terrible to be pregnant again when I'm not even sure I want to stay with him. But I keep having this strange impulse to do what I can to get pregnant. It's almost like I want to punish him. Or test him."
    "Have you actually done it?" Eleanor said. "Taken the diaphragm out?"
    "Just once."
    Eleanor didn't know precisely why Jenny would want to do something that had such a high probability of leading to more misery for herself, but it didn't surprise her. It's what we all do, she thought.
    She wanted to say:
Don't do it. Don't blow it. Don't fuck up your life
. But, for better or for worse, she didn't.
    Clients often wait until the end of their session to come out with the things that most deeply disturb them. It was hard to know why. Was it simply because the things that were hard to say always came last? Or was there some sort of test involved—were they testing their therapists to see if they'd relax their boundaries and let the session go on?
    Eleanor never relaxed her boundaries. She looked at the clock and said, "It's time," and stood up.
    After Jenny left, Eleanor spent a few minutes drawing together her thoughts. She tried to do this after every session. Jenny, from the beginning, had posed a particular challenge. Eleanor had to monitor herself constantly to make sure she wasn't reading her own life into Jenny's. It would be so easy to superimpose Adam's features over Nick's, and to start rooting for Jenny to leave him, as she herself should have left Adam years ago. And it wouldn't be hard to go the other way and idealize Nick, to see him as a man who had made one mistake and was prepared to pay for it—to imagine him, yes, as a flawed man, but, in contrast to Adam, a flawed man who was in love with his wife. Her job, part of her job, was to help Jenny paint her own picture of her own life, not to paint one for her.
    She put Telemann's Trio in E Minor in the CD player. At the end of the day she liked to listen to something by Telemann or Mozart or Vivaldi or Bach, something to remind her of the possibility of happiness. Freud had famously told a prospective client that he couldn't say that psychoanalysis would make her happy; all he was offering her was the chance to exchange her present misery for an ordinary unhappiness. Given the human condition, he thought, one could hope for nothing more than that. Eleanor thought he was right. But it was good to be reminded of the
idea
of happiness.
    After half an hour, she gathered up her things and started out for home. Her apartment was only fifteen blocks away from her office. It was nice to walk in the coppery light of the autumn afternoon.
    This was the round of her life now, ever since Adam had moved out. During the day, people came to her and she listened to them, wondering, all the while, whether she was listening well enough, creatively enough, intelligently enough, responsively enough. And at night she tried to listen to herself. She would come home to an apartment that was too large for her, have dinner and a drink, open her notebook, and resume the effort to understand her own past and to make out the shape of her future.

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Fourteen
    During the walk she stopped at a grocery and picked up a chicken breast and some asparagus, intending to cook herself dinner, but when she got home she abandoned the plan. This happened pretty much every night. She would briefly think about transforming herself into a "strong, proud woman living alone," the kind that her friend Vivian would approve of, and making a meal for herself always seemed like a necessary first step. But then she would decide she was too tired, and she'd pick up the phone and order Chinese food, which was one reason she had gained so much weight over the past year.
    After deciding to have some food delivered, she would always tell herself that she was going to read while she ate. But when the food came, she would still feel tired, too tired for the exertion of reading, and she would eat her