Read Visible City for Free Online Page A

face, he realized this was a mistake, one he wouldn’t have made at work. His patients never liked to feel that they were taking up his time, even though they were paying for it, and because of this, he kept his clock on the bookshelf behind where they sat so he could unobtrusively keep track.
    He had waited for Emma to say what was on her mind, but all she offered was the pain in her ankle. Of all the things she might have said, this was the least complicated, and in his hurry to leave, Leon hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that it was anything more. But when he said goodbye, he could see that he had failed her. “It is a pleasure to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found,” he thought, from the work of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott. It was true, and not just of children playing hide-and-seek.
    Until Emma had come home, he and Claudia had passed their nights reading on the couch, turning pages as a form of conversation. But every night was now spent in hushed conference, Claudia picking apart Emma’s words to assemble an explanation of what was really wrong. Even if he had the patience for the discussion, he couldn’t muster the same concern. From a young age, Emma had not been the kind of child you worried about. He took great satisfaction in his daughter’s self-sufficiency, a trait she had inherited from him as surely as her dark curls and heart-shaped mouth were from Claudia. They had been subjected to the usual jokes about therapists’ kids being screwed up, but he’d always laughed off those comments because Emma, with her ebullient confidence, her ease of accomplishment, had so clearly emerged unscathed.
    After leaving the apartment, he had sat in his car which was as old as Emma, a Volvo wagon, boxy and white, with 250,000 miles on the odometer. It had begun its life as a family car, with toys and crumbs buried under the seats, but now it was his private ship. He was in control of the music and the climate. The doors could be locked. People who walked by might see him, but no one would knock.
    He’d watched the people who passed: The old man shepherded by his female attendant, then the children on tricycles, metal poles attached to the backs for the mothers to push when the kids grew tired. Next came the two dogs who hated one another. The small gray terrier wearing a bejeweled blue collar was seemingly of a different species from the black Great Dane. The little dog was fearless, barking incessantly, as though no one had informed him of the impotence of his high-pitched yap. The owners were well matched to their dogs. A petite woman with cropped gray hair and bright blue glasses, exuding the same nervous energy as her dog. A tall, pompous, dark-haired man with excessively straight posture and an air of proprietary combativeness. If Leon were to guess, he’d say that the man drew his fierceness from the dog. Was that true for all pet owners? he wondered. On the leash or in the cage, was some real or imagined aspect of ourselves made manifest?
    His fellow parkers began stepping out of their cars as though given word that they’d docked on dry land. He too emerged from his car, now allowed to park in the spot he’d been holding all morning. Instead of moving forward into his day, he was still thinking about the look on Emma’s face. Though he feigned being in a hurry, he’d had enough time before his first patient to go back and ask her what she’d really wanted. He wasn’t proud of this aspect of himself, but there it was, true and unchangeable: At work, he had the capacity to give endlessly. At home, he was impatient before he’d even begun. Instead of going to talk to Emma, he’d gone to Starbucks. Though he’d once chafed at the idea of paying three dollars for a cup of coffee, now he gladly paid for the luxury of sitting undisturbed. Was this the secret to the chain’s success? No one wanted to be home.
    Now, at the end of his day, Leon walked back uptown, the streets