Free Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect by M. J. Rose Page B

shouldn’t it have? That is the art of therapy, Nina Butterfield had taught me.
    For a time, you as the therapist also have to become vulnerable. By doing so you can connect in a way that builds trust and allows you to understand things that often have no obvious logic but can be sacred to your patient.
    Our forty-five minutes were over and Cleo noticed it before I did.
    “I have to leave on time. I have an appointment downtown,” she said with a sorry shake of her head that made me think she was off to see a client.
    “I’ll see you Wednesday,” she added.
    I nodded. “Cleo, maybe you shouldn’t make up your mind about whether or not to do what Caesar is asking until then. Would that be okay with you?”
    She didn’t say anything as she gathered her leather bag and straightened her skirt.
    “Yes. You’re probably right.”
    But she had a look in her eye that reiterated that she was feeling desperate and that she was running out of time.
    I wished later that I had taken the look more seriously. I wished I had called out to her and told her to be careful. Be extremely careful. But she had convinced me, by the way she tossed her hair, looking me in the eye with her cool gray eyes, that she knew how to take care of herself.
    Eyes had lied to me before.

12
     
    A fter Dulcie and I had dinner, we watched
My Fair Lady
on television. Then my daughter went to her room to study the part she’d won in
Our Town
while I stayed in the living room and picked up Cleo’s book.
    I read it that night and another hundred pages the next night, and with every page became more and more aware of why she was worried about what would happen to her if she did, indeed, go ahead and publish this book.
    I was anxious to see her on Wednesday morning, but for the second time in a row, Cleo was late for her appointment.
    During the first fifteen minutes, I assumed she was still on her way. But by ten-thirty, I realized she wasn’t coming.
    Had we delved too far in the last session? Had she run scared? I hadn’t expected she would react this way to opening up.
    Maybe she just woke up with a sore throat and meant tocall but fell back asleep, I reasoned. Or maybe she got an early-morning call from a client that she couldn’t ignore.
    I did some paperwork and made some calls and gave up waiting.
    When a patient misses a session without calling, they get charged the full price of the appointment. I don’t call to find out where someone is. At the start of the next session, I ask him or her to explain what happened.
    And so I put Cleo out of my mind and left my office at twelve-fifteen. My next appointment wasn’t until two o’clock, and I needed to walk.
    It was a lovely June afternoon and I headed into Central Park, crossing by the Bethesda Fountain and going west. I passed nanies with children holding on to toys, their faces smeared with food; dog walkers trotting along at a fast clip, each with a pack of ten or thirteen dogs; and young couples full of the romance of spring, holding hands and walking lazily in the sunshine.
    I looked at them and thought of my daughter, thankful that she was two or three years away from her first pass at love. And I hoped it might not happen even that soon. And then, without cosciously being aware of it, I was thinking about Cleo again and her confusion now that she was feeling the stirrings of a powerful emotion she wasn’t very familiar with.
    Love isn’t a germ or a virus. We can’t put it under a microscope to examine it. Nor is sexual attraction or desire or lack of desire. Or any of the fetishes and anxieties that haunt us. But I try, along with everyone else at the institute and therapists all over the world, to treat people who succumb to love or passion or lust or any variation of those and who get sick with them.
    The wind picked up and debris scattered. My eye caughtthe headline on the sheet of newsprint that had snagged on the bottom of the stone water fountain.
    No Headway in Hooker