style="font-size:15px;"> I walked up to the desk and craned my head in her direction. No response.
“Uh . . .”
“Tamar.” She continued to shuffle papers around her desk.
“Tamar, of course. Do you know anything about that picture someone hung in my office?”
“All I know is that the new Americana boss was looking for you.” She tossed me a baleful glance before launching into a rapid-fire explanation of clinic procedures to the patient at the front of the line.
I went back to my office and stared at the new painting some more. Finally I picked up the phone.
“Jezebel?”
“Ah, yes, Kobi. I’ve been looking for you all morning. Can you come to my office right away?”
“I have a patient in five minutes. Do you happen to know—”
“Well then immediately after that. At 11:00?”
“I usually take lunch—”
“It’s 9:55, and I gather you just stepped in. Your lunch can wait. Be here at 11:00 sharp.”
The click of the phone was ominous. I knew she’d had her eye on me; I could have at least made an effort to come in on time. I left Yossi a message canceling our 11:15 squash game at the YMCA. The 10:00 never showed, so I spent the hour sprawled out on my leather recliner devising clever retorts to her imagined accusations, righteously defending my professionalism and wounded honor. At 11:00, I pulled myself out of the familiar reverie and forced my way toward her open door.
She motioned me to sit while finishing her phone call, glaring at me as she spoke. When she finally hung up the phone, I steeled for the thirty-nine lashes.
“You’ve been at Jerusalem Hospital a long time, Kobi.”
“Twelve years at the clinic. Five as chief psychologist.”
“And I’ve only been here a couple of months. You may think it’s premature for me to make judgments, but that’s what I was hired to do. Things have been very lax around here.”
“Well, that depends—”
“I think you’d better let me finish.”
I wondered what she had looked like thirty years ago, before she’d started stuffing herself into tightly tailored suits. Had she ever had a soft edge? I tried to imagine her as a young woman but could see nothing but this click-heeled harridan.
“There’s a lot of discontent among the staff,” she began, her voice stern.
“People like to complain about their bosses,” I said calmly. “It’s human nature. You can’t take that kind of thing too seriously.”
“I’ve been hired to take it seriously,” she snapped. “Caseloads are far too large. There’s not enough psychiatric support, too much redundant paperwork, and no substantive training. The waiting lists are endless—the entire country is reeling from trauma, and it takes three months to get an appointment. The clinicians and support staff have given me numerous suggestions of how to make this clinic function more efficiently. They say that talking to you is like talking to a wall.”
I nodded. “In this town, people find that quite effective.”
She ignored my lame attempt at humor. “It’s not only inefficiency they complain of. You come in late, you leave early. You disappear for hours at a time. Your caseload is a fraction the size of the other clinicians.”
“Well you know, there’s a lot of administrative work—”
“You’re seen as, let’s see . . .” She lifted her chin to perch a pair of reading glasses on the end of her beaked nose and scanned a long page of hand-scrawled notes. “Inaccessible . . . aloof . . . arrogant . . . not a member of the team . . . out of touch with the field . . .”
“I’ve always wondered what that phrase meant. You know, there’s way too much jargon—”
She took her glasses off with a snap of her wrist. “There are charts that have been languishing on your desk since the Flood.”
“Now in all fairness, that’s well before my time.” I grinned at my own joke, but her face remained stony.
“You showed an Arabic movie at the last staff meeting. Without subtitles. Is that your idea of in-service training?”
“It’s a great film—I thought it would be dubbed. It’s really an interesting case study of the Oedipal urge that underlies—”
“We are overrun with severe grief reactions and post-traumatic stress, and you’re worried about the Oedipal urge?”
“Now look, you can’t just ignore the fundamentals—”
A muscle moved in her jaw. “OK, forget the outmoded theories and utter inadequacy of your in-service trainings. There are other, more serious complaints—rumors of inappropriate relationships with patients.”
“Inappropriate. That’s another great word. If it were eliminated from the therapeutic vocabulary—”
She interrupted me again, her voice steely. “No one has yet filed an official complaint, but there’s a lot of ugly gossip going around.”
“I’m really shocked that you would listen to unsubstantiated rumors,” I said indignantly, my mind quickly flicking through the possibilities.
“The new intern, Dina. She called this morning to say that she’s quitting her internship. She won’t tell anyone why.” That one I hadn’t expected.
“There could be any number of reasons,” I stammered.
“You were the last one seen with her.” She paused, watching me closely.
I regained my composure. If this was her big gotcha moment, she’d blown it. After all, nothing had happened between Dina and me! “Well of course, that must be it,” I said in the no-nonsense tone I used to calm hysterical patients. “We had to hospitalize a psychotic patient Thursday night. Dina asked me to help out—she’d never been involved with a forced hospitalization. You know how stressful those can be; we were there for hours. And it was the same evening as the King George Street bombing. You can just imagine what was going on in that waiting room. By the way,” I added, “we should speak to the ER about finding a more protected location for psychiatric patients. We could see and hear almost everything.” I shook my head. “It was terribly stressful for her. She’s awfully young, you know.” I sat back and let out a world-weary sigh. “My guess is that the experience made her realize that she’s just not cut out for this work. Better to realize it earlier than later.” I looked at her expectantly.
Her expression had not changed. “You expect me to believe that story?”
“Why not?” I sat forward again. “What are you implying?”
“You know what I’m implying.”
“But you have no proof
