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And love is not a victory march.
Leonard Cohen
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Katia
Katia knew that look in her patients’ eyes. She had questioned the competence of her own therapist. In her case it had been a woman, black like her, when she was fifteen. Now, as she started her own practice, the patients came to her instead. And she was convinced their lives were bigger and more damaged than her own.
She was silent as she sat across from her first patient of the day, a man about her age. He had short, tussled blond hair, his weathered skin affirming the hours he spent outdoors.
Katia wanted to throw her notepad at him: Say something, will you?! This doesn’t work unless you help me here. This was their second session and both fidgeted as if on an internet-arranged date.
“Mr. Nielsen, how is your son adjusting?”
“You can call me Tyler. Mr. Nielsen sounds like my dad’s name.”
“How so?”
“I’m usually Officer Nielsen. Then I was Corporal Nielsen. But I’ve never really been Mr. Nielsen. Just Tyler.”
“And now you’re the dad.”
“Sammy doesn’t call me that.”
“No, not yet, I’m sure. But he will.”
Tyler stopped. He hunched his shoulders slightly as if confessing. This is how it went with him. He would start, stingily offer a few details, then stop again, staring at the floor or at his interlaced fingers. Seeing him like this, it was hard for her to imagine how he must have been when on patrol, with his uniform, his gun, his broad shoulders and muscular arms commanding respect.
Katia had asked her clinical supervisor about Tyler’s long silences. Just let him be. If it goes on too long, ask him again if he wants to continue seeing you. And if he says yes, let the minutes go. Ask some questions but not too many. If it goes on like that, I would say you stop the session after fifteen or twenty minutes and suggest to him that you start again the next week.
Katia lost her concentration when he stopped like this. She thought about her recent move to Austin, her other clients, and whether Goran would call. Whether she wanted him to call. Whether she missed him. Or whether she was glad they were in this extended period of undefined, long-distance whatever and that he was a safe distance away in the apartment they had once shared in Chicago.
“I’m worried about what I’m starting to feel and if it’ll confuse him.”
Tyler’s voice seemed to come from the next room or the next building, from down the street. The words snaked their way into the quiet of the consultation room. It took Katia a moment to re-engage.
“What is it you’re starting to feel?”
“For this woman I met. It’s like my boy just came into my life. I never even knew I had a son until now. And just when I’m figuring out how to get on with him, I meet this woman.”
“Do you want to talk about her?”
“It’s not about her, or who she is really. It’s about that feeling, if you know what I mean.”
Katia knew she should wait for him to say more, but the halting flow of Tyler’s words was unbearable.
“Tell me about that feeling.”
Tyler took a deep breath and stared at her with exasperation.
“It’s like Afghanistan. Like being on those patrols. At night. Even with night gear and all. I mean even in the daytime in Afghanistan it’s like you’re blind. You have no idea when they’ll hit you or what they’ll hit you with or who’s out there. If they’re Taliban or just some goat herder and his family getting on with their day. Every time you come around a blind spot or a corner, every step, you’re ready for that explosion. Direct or indirect. It’s all the same. That’s how I feel with a woman when I’m starting to care about her, you know. It’s like love is … like I’m completely blind.”
Katia repressed a smile. Only occasionally did Tyler use so many words. She struggled not to hum the rest of the song that jumped into her head, and not to tell Tyler her own story. She knew that wasn’t allowed, and she knew this wasn’t about her.
“Sammy cries at night. He calls out for her, you know, for his mother.”
“Does Sammy ever talk about her?”
“Not really. Only if I ask him.”
“And, how do you feel about what Sammy’s mother did?”
“I don’t know what to make of it.”
Katia waited again for him to say more but she did not insist. Neither did he say anything more about the woman he had just met. She let that go too. It was enough that he was using so many words. In the end, she was relieved that they had made it through this second session.
As Tyler closed the door to the consultation room, Katia moved to her desk and opened her laptop. With one part of her brain she wrote up the notes from the session. The other part was thinking about that song. And that made her think about Goran.
Love is blindness. I don’t want to see. Won’t you wrap the night around me … Oh, my heart. Love is blindness.
◆ ◆ ◆
“We should go here,” Goran had said that morning, more than a year before Katia had moved to Austin. “We have a day in Zagreb before we leave for the coast.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table in the small apartment near the university, where Goran worked. It still felt like his apartment, even though she had moved in with him a few weeks back. He handed her the New York Times Sunday travel section. Katia took a few minutes to read a short article describing the museum where people sent letters of love lost and ended.
“Sure, I guess. Sounds a little melancholic though,” Katia said.
“We’re a melancholic people,” Goran said, smiling joyfully. He slid his right forearm across the small table to her right forearm and grasped gently. She felt safe like this, their arms interlaced, just as she had with every decision that had led her here, to move in with him.
They went back to reading their respective sections of the Times. He asked her if she wanted more coffee and he got up to make it. As he set her cup in front of her, he ran his fingers down her neck. It was one of things that had first attracted her to him, his long, elegant fingers. Katia turned the palm of his right hand up and kissed it and then pulled it under her robe.
This is what they could be. What they were. What she imagined they would remain. She believed they were on a
