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quit drinking and join AA since he’d started therapy with me.
    “Jacob,” I said, leaning forward and giving him my most therapeutically direct look, trying to make us both believe that anything I said would have any effect on him whatsoever, “I think it would be a very good idea for you to try to drink less while I’m gone. I think it exacerbates your mania and panic attacks, and I feel strongly that you’d feel much, much calmer about things like Manny and holiday shopping if you eased up a little on the booze. It screws with your body chemistry. It affects your sleep patterns, your moods, and your ability to think clearly.”
    “I know,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Thank you for saying that.”
    I held his gaze.
    “Don’t go,” he said. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but his face crumpled a little. Jacob was a weeper; he wept openly, easily, like a kid. His face reminded me of a marionette’s; he had pronounced nasolabial lines, a long, thin, comical mouth, glittering, merry eyes, and a preserved, wooden, boyish innocence. He had grown up in a small and small-minded town in the Midwest, the oldest son of an evangelical preacher and his wife. He had been tormented with his terrible secret, feeling that his family would never love him or accept him, and, exactly as he had feared, his parents had cursed him and cut him off when he’d finally confessed, almost ten years before, that he was gay. He had been in constant, terrible emotional pain as long as he could remember, and I could not figure out how to get him to let me help him. I was feeling sweaty and impotent; my underarms prickled. I wished I hadn’t turned the thermostat up so high. I wished he would shut up for one whole session and let me tell him exactly what he needed to do, and then do it. “I’m going to be so lonely without you,” he told me.
    “Why don’t you try a meeting while I’m gone, if you feel like it?” I said. “Report back to me when we meet in January. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts about what it’s like. I think, if nothing else, it would give you a lot to think about. You’d hear a lot of stories that would resonate with you, and you would feel so much less alone.”
    “You’re making me bawl, damn it,” he said, bawling. He took a Kleenex from the box at his elbow and dabbed at his eyes.
    “Let’s make a deal, Jacob, that you’ll go to one meeting while I’m gone, and meanwhile, you’ll drink half as much as usual for a couple of nights. One meeting, fewer drinks. Do you think you can do that?”
    After Jacob was gone, I let out a long breath. Of course he would not do a single thing I’d suggested. He would go to no meeting; he would have several nightcaps every night and fall asleep drunk and in tears and, more often than not, alone. He would let his unfaithful, selfish, sexy boyfriend treat him like shit, and he would buy him a lot of presents he couldn’t afford, and then he would drink even more to drown his sadness, his loneliness, his belief that he was worthless. The answer was right there: Quit drinking, join AA, dump Manny, and be alone until you find someone who respects and loves you. But he didn’t want it. He desperately did not want to change. He wanted to stay exactly as he was and have it all somehow magically made okay. A few times, I had suggested terminating therapy to stop wasting his money and time, but he had adamantly refused. He seemed to think merely showing up to these sessions ought to be enough: Why should he have to do anything beyond talk to me? The answer was that of course he didn’t. It was his life and his decision. I was an instrument he could use, or not, at his own discretion, nothing more. As a therapist, I knew this, but as a person, I worried about him and, at the same time, I wanted to shake him hard.
    Two down, two to go: halfway there. I looked at Jacob’s file, holding my pen poised over the empty page dated December 21. What was