glared at me. “You’re right. I have no proof that anything untoward happened. She won’t say anything to anyone. But there’s a lot of whispering going around.”
“Look, this is a big misunderstanding. The receptionists don’t like me very much. They start rumors. You know how that is.”
“And why do you think they don’t like you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. An authority thing. I think there’s some unconscious envy, and—”
“Kobi, I’m putting you on probation.” It took a moment for the words to sink in.
“But . . . I don’t think you can actually do that . . . and . . .”
“Three months. Passover begins Wednesday night. After the holiday, I’ll take over all your administrative duties. You will start coming in on time and leaving on time. You will get the standard hour for lunch. Your caseload is going up by a third, and you’re going to keep on top of the paperwork. Starting today, the receptionists are taking full control over your schedule—I’ve given them explicit instructions in that regard. I want all those charts completed and off your desk. You can use the holiday to get a jump start.” She looked at me sharply. “And make sure the rumors stop. Is that clear?”
I stared at her, my mind in a daze.
“Kobi.” She leaned forward and her voice took on the familiar, exasperated tone of my elementary school principal. “I hope you’ve been listening. You start behaving like a professional or you’re fired. The hospital is undergoing major cutbacks and reorganization; I don’t like it any more than you do. But your squash buddy ran this clinic like a country club, and those days are over. They hired me because I was trained in America, where productivity and accountability are taken seriously. Where people sue if they don’t get appropriate treatment. That’s the model the whole country is going toward, and not only in health care.” She sat back again. “We all have to start getting used to it.”
I continued to stare at her like a dumb kid.
“But it’s not just that,” she continued, her voice suddenly pressured and earnest. “At a time of such extreme collective distress, mental health clinics have a particular responsibility to the nation. We have to function in as professional and efficient a manner as possible. We owe at least that to our fellow citizens. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded my head, still unable to find my voice. She sighed deeply, then got up to let me know I was dismissed.
“What happened to my dartboard?” I finally blurted out.
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Inappropriate, eh?”
“You’ve got three months, habibi.”
In my office, I leaned back in my desk chair and gingerly inched my feet onto the top of the desk, careful not to dislodge the mountains of haphazardly piled charts. I took off my glasses and wearily rubbed my eyes. The Chagall was marginally more tolerable as a formless splash of color. But returning the glasses to my nose, the floating lovers came back into focus, their smitten grins as irritating as ever. I picked a rubber band off the desk and flipped it across the room, missing by a good meter the woman’s upside-down breasts. What was the harm in a dartboard? I would now be reduced to shooting rubber bands like a sixth-grade boy, flipping paper clips, tossing pushpins at random targets in the room. It was an elemental male impulse, this ejaculatory thrust into the world, but what would that castrating witch know about that.
Appealing to my national duty—that was the last straw. Immigrants could be insufferable in that way. Most of them hadn’t even served in the army. I had already done enough for my esteemed country, rooting out terrorists in the alleys of Ramallah. Did she really believe that providing efficient mental health services meant a damn when every bus and market and café was a target for a suicide bomb? What difference could it possibly make to the national psyche if one bored psychologist took out some of his frustrations with a dartboard?
She was right about one thing—the country was changing, and fast. It was becoming a big corporation, swallowing up the little mom-and-pop store it had been just a few years ago. People were enthusiastically pursuing the Israeli version of the American dream, throwing around words like “productivity” and “accountability,” smiling polite little smiles, saying “Have a nice day” while suing each other into bankruptcy. In the old Israel, people would growl at you on the street but you could trust them with uncounted money. In the old Israel, your lunch hour could stretch into a long, lazy afternoon and no one would ever notice or care.
I randomly picked a chart out of one of the piles and glanced at the name. Havah Ashkenazi. Who the hell was that? Was I really supposed to make up years’ worth of sessions and treatment plans out of whole cloth?
Nava would gloat if she heard about my probation. It was beyond me why this latest incident with Dina had set her off like that. It had all been a misunderstanding—I wouldn’t really have seduced that innocent young thing. Not that it hadn’t crossed my mind, but it had been nothing more than idle fantasy. Anyway, it was impossible to be a man in this field and not play around a bit. The patients were almost exclusively female, all of them hungry for some comforting male attention. Sure, there were psychiatrists, with their mind-numbing drugs; but I was the sensitive therapist, and all I had to do was stroke my chin thoughtfully and it made these women melt. It wasn’t such a big deal—they were frivolous rolls on the therapy couch. I shouldn’t have gotten so brazen, staying out to all hours on flimsy excuses. But I was a good father and provider, never took those flings seriously. Did none of that matter to Nava? And to bar me, now, from my daughter’s bat mitzvah party? What had snapped in her that she could toss me, so thoroughly and unceremoniously, out the door?
I flung a paper clip at the doorknob and was rewarded with a satisfying ping. I stared at the upside-down lovers in the Chagall reproduction and felt another surge of hatred for the painting. I imagined coming in one day to find the weightless lovers fallen and crashed to the pavement.
The telephone made me jump.
“Dr. Benami, your 12:00 patient is here.”
What the hell was that about? I never scheduled a patient at 12:00. I had already missed my squash game and hadn’t had a bite of lunch.
“Are you sure it’s for me?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve been told to schedule you in more tightly. Didn’t you check the day’s appointments?” Her voice was thick with sarcasm.
“Well, no. Who is it?”
“Penina Mizrachi.”
The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place her.
“Tell her I’m running a little late. Tell her it will be at least a half hour.”
A long, accusatory silence preceded the frigid reply. “I’ll let her know.”
I stared helplessly at the mounds of dog-eared charts for a few seconds, then angrily flipped another rubber band across the room. I had been aiming at the doorknob again but hit the lamp by the side of the couch instead, making it totter on its base. What if I broke a few things in this sterile, hospital-neat office? Without my dartboard, the office would now be littered with the detritus of my office supply requisitions, and the cleaning lady could add her lilting, Arabic soprano to the choir of voices singing out for my dismissal.
But
