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nothing. For five years they had danced, the two of them, the strangest dance in history, each attuned to the other and awaiting his pleasure, and so off they went crabwise and nowhere at all.
    The doctor didn’t like his patient much, to tell the truth. They were not good friends. Although they had spent a thousand hours together in the most intimate converse, they were no more than acquaintances. Less than acquaintances. A laborer digging in a ditch would know more about his partner in a week than the doctor had learned about this patient in a year. Yet outwardly they were friendly enough.
    The engineer, on the other hand, had a high opinion of his analyst and especially liked hearing him speak. Though Dr. Gamow was a native of Jackson Heights, his speech was exotic. He had a dark front tooth, turned on its axis, and he puckered his lips and pronounced his r ’s almost like w ’s. The engineer liked to hear him say neu-wosis, drawing out the second syllable with a musical clinical Viennese sound. Unlike most Americans, who speak as if they were sipping gruel, he chose his words like bonbons, so that his patients, whose lives were a poor meager business, received the pleasantest sense of the richness and delectability of such everyday things as words. Unlike some analysts, he did not use big words or technical words; but the small ordinary words he did use were invested with a peculiar luster. “I think you are pretty unhappy after all,” he might say, pronouncing pr?tty as it is spelled. His patient would nod gratefully. Even unhappiness is not so bad when it can be uttered so well. And in truth it did seem to the engineer, who was quick to sniff out theories and such, that people would feel better if they could lay hold of ordinary words.
    At five o’clock, the Southerner’s hour, the office smelled of the accumulated misery of the day, an ozone of malcontent which stung the eyes like a Lionel train. Some years ago the room had been done in a Bahama theme, with a fiber rug and prints of hummingbirds and Negresses walking with baskets on their heads, but the rug had hardened and curled up at the corners like old skin. Balls of fluff drifted under the rattan table.
    â€œI—suggest—that if it is all right with you—” began Dr. Gamow, jotting a note on a smooth yellow pad with a gold pencil (this is all you really need to set your life in order, the patient was thinking, a good pad and pencil), “—we’ll change Monday from five to five thirty. How is that for you, bad, eh?”
    â€œNo, it’s not bad at all.”
    Dr. Gamow pricked up his ears. “Did you say mad?”
    â€œNo, I believe I said bad: it’s not bad at all.”
    â€œIt seemed to me that at first you said mad.”
    â€œIt’s possible,” said the agreeable patient.
    â€œI can’t help wondering,” said Dr. Gamow shyly, “who is mad at who.” Whenever he caught his patient in a slip, he had a way of slewing his eyes around as shyly as a young girl. “Now what might it be that you are mad about?”
    â€œI’m not really.”
    â€œI detected a little more m than b . I think maybe you are a little mad at me.”
    â€œI don’t—” began the other, casting back in his mind to the events of the last session, but as usual he could remember nothing. “You may well be right, but I don’t recall anything in particular.”
    â€œMaybe you think I’m a little mad at you.”
    â€œI honestly don’t know,” said the patient, pretending to rack his brain but in fact savoring the other’s words. Maybe, for example, was minted deliberately as a bright new common coin mebbe in conscious preference to perhaps.
    Dr. Gamow put his knees exactly together, put his head to one side, and sighted down into the kneehole of his desk. He might have been examining a bank of instruments. His nostril curved up exposing the