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vibrate with joy.
    “I can’t know for sure, of course,” I said. “But I can be more objective, possibly. I see before me a confident young professional woman who’s got her life together. He might need reassurance from you on some level that you don’t look down on him. Maybe he’s not putting you down at all. He might be trying to right a balance in his own mind, trying to impress you, underneath.”
    After Sasha departed, burbling, “Happy holidays! See you in two weeks,” I made a few comments in her folder, then reviewed my notes from Jacob Turner’s session from the previous week. As I did so, I remembered the smell of Peter’s apartment—it, like him, had smelled of toast and jam—and gently burped up some red wine-tasting gas. I was a little surprised to realize that I wasn’t feeling guilty; I was feeling more psychically awake than I had felt in a long time and almost dazed with the force of my own suddenly freed, untrammeled anger. I had worked so hard with so many clients for so many years to get them to acknowledge and feel their own anger, and meanwhile I had been containing mine with every muscle and tendon and neuron. Now it was loosened, sparking freely, high-voltage and dangerous. God, it felt good.
    The buzzer rang, and with a sigh I pushed the button to let Jacob in. I rubbed my hand over my face. Jacob had made very little identifiable progress in three years. In fact, at times I feared he was regressing. He was a forty-three-year-old Santa’s elf of a man, with a manic, spritely, hectically charming manner that masked a stark and seemingly insurmountable terror of change. Jacob was one of those clients who caused me to question my therapeutic chops, although in the main I still believed we could get somewhere together, someday. His tactic was to keep any meaningful work at bay by erecting a shield of chatter the instant he arrived, which he kept impenetrably aloft for the entire session, every session. I had to force him to shut up and think about what he was saying by interrupting him, catching him off guard with an unexpected question or statement. Sometimes he was startled into a rare insight about himself, which led to a more substantive discussion between us, but this seemed to fade from his brain the instant he left my office and went back to the largely self-generated maelstrom of his emotional life.
    Now, because I was going on vacation, he was frantic and babbling.
    “And then, of course, I tried Macy’s, but my God, the throngs, it was like trying to see the shit through the flies.” He cackled.
    “That must have been stressful,” I said. “How did you—”
    “So I gave up and went home and ordered a couple of sweaters for Manny on-line and said screw everyone else and got in a hot bath and had myself a merry little hot toddy or two. It was more like four.”
    “And how did you—”
    “Dr. Dorvillier, I swear, one of these days I will join AA, but not now, not in the holiday season, please. Do you know I am the only person I know whose therapist goes away for the holidays?”
    We went through this every year.
    “How are you feeling about that today?” I asked.
    “Not good! But not to worry, I’ll survive, thanks in part to my dear friends Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Johnnie Walker red and black, and Manny, when he bothers to come over. Damn it, I bet he’s going to break up with me before Christmas, the little cunt, and then he’ll get out of giving me a present and get hot make-up sex at New Year’s.”
    “Do you feel pressure from me to quit drinking?”
    “I feel pressure from the whole frickin’ universe! Like the universe cares what I do. Listen to me. But I absolutely do drink much, much, much too much. And I look like shit. Look at me. I’m a fucking crone. Vanity will make me quit eventually, if nothing else does. The liver regenerates, and I don’t need to live forever, but I do want to be beautiful.”
    Jacob had been talking about wanting to