Free Living Room by Sol Stein

need that in your contract, Shirley,” Arthur had said. “If it would make your office a happier place to work, I’ll see that it gets put there.”
    “What happens if you got hit by a truck—that subject comes up at board meetings once a year, doesn’t it?—I want your key man insurance to cover the bird of paradise.”
    To satisfy her, Arthur put in the corporate files a letter to his successor suggesting that the tradition of a bird of paradise for Shirley Hartman be maintained in the event of his death. Arthur thought of it as a feminine whim, an expression he would never have dared to use in her presence. She was his most talented employee and he would have bought her a Rolls or a bidet for her private bathroom if she had asked for it.
    Though the other employees of Armon, Caiden, Crouch had had time enough to get used to Shirley’s presence among them, she sometimes detected a glance that reminded her of Charlotte and the kids in the schoolyard. Her confreres played walk-on parts season after season in a hit show of which Shirley was clearly the star.
    She needed to talk to a friend. Not fellow employees, not Mary, not Jack, someone who—she thought of Hester Fedder, her roommate at Barnard. The penciled phone number was smudged but legible. Nobody by that name there. She checked with Mary. Mary had not kept track of Hester.
    Her work went in spasms, a manic week followed by a weekend-long depression. She took the knot in her gut to a doctor, who found nothing wrong.
    She yearned for the time when she and Hester would lie on beds on the opposite side of the room, stare at the ceiling and exchange confidences. She needed somebody to talk to.
    The physician who found nothing gave her the name of Dr. Gunther Koch.
    The magazines in his waiting room were old copies of Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Koch, when he appeared, was gray-maned, his face a welter of crinkles, his accent faintly European. German? Viennese? Weren’t they all?
    When they were seated face-to-face in his paneled study, Koch said, “What can I do for you?”
    She didn’t know.
    “Why are you here?”
    She didn’t know. Then she remembered the knot in her gut. He said, “That is not why you are here. What are you thinking of, now, this second while you are not paying attention?”
    She thought him abrupt, his directness rude, and told him so. He smiled, and gently asked her again to tell him what she had been thinking.
    And so it began, three times a week in Dr. Koch’s haven, no longer face to face but lying down, hearing his sigh behind her, his questions so gently put yet opening fistulas in her memory as she, seemingly at random, recounted her mother’s death, the year in bed, her fear of the mob at school, her shock at realizing that in the cyclone of her career she needed friends.
    “Some husbands and wives are friends. A few.”
    “You’re cynical.”
    “No,” said Koch, “I try to be exact. We can lie to others if it makes life easier, but to ourselves it does no good. You feel…”
    She waited for the words.
    “A success in business, a failure in friendship. If you could switch, would you be a failure in business, and have many friends?”
    After a moment, she said “No.”
    “You are right. One has few friends. The rest are acquaintances. You do not have the skill to be a bumbler in business. You are what you are.”
    “I work like a maniac.”
    “That will change.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    Again the sigh. “Experience,” he said.
    In time, the knot didn’t come back. When she thought of a friend, she thought of Gunther Koch. And told him so.
    “Shirley,” he said. “This is your last hour for a while. If you get in trouble, you can always come back.”
    “You’re firing me.”
    “You need to cut loose from here. Now.”
    It was only after they shook hands that he said, “One cannot run a life like a popularity contest. Who