Free Envy by Kathryn Harrison Page A

finish.”
    â€œAll right. I’m listening.”
    â€œOkay. This is the only way I can answer. I’ve thought about Luke’s continued existence. I don’t mean my wish that he live on, but the conflict—the discontinuity—between his presence within me and his absence in the world. I’ve ascribed that, that disparity to the unconscious. My unconscious. I know that Luke’s . . .” Will stops, unable, for a moment, to speak. When he does, the first few words come out choked. “I know he’s dead,” he says, reaching for his father’s arm. “But only when I’m awake, conscious. In my unconscious, Luke lives. The realness of him in my dreams is, is so . . . I wake up, and the bed, the floor, my wife, my own hand—nothing has the . . . the reality, the incandescent life of the child in my dreams. My unconscious.
    â€œSo,” Will says, “maybe that’s an example of the unconscious being God’s country. A place of life after death. Of resurrection. Reunion with those who die before us.”
    His father nods, looking up. “Heaven,” he says. “Just as it’s always been promised.”

6
    The responsible thing to do—he tells himself every day—would be to take a leave of absence.
    Instead, Will has done the opposite. As if to foreclose opportunities for reflection, the danger of too much time spent exploring his own psyche, he’s expanded his caseload to make a total of nineteen weekly patients as well as one daily and five thrice-weekly analysands to whom he listens and comments. Comments appropriately, despite whatever alarming, inappropriate sexual scenario is unspooling in his head. Even comments wisely, if he is to believe one fervent letter of thanks.
    Denial? Defiance? The exhausting prospect of having to refer all his patients to other therapists, either temporarily, meaning he could look forward to returning to all the compounded distrust and anger his abandonment inspired, or permanently, meaning he’d have to start over and build a new practice from scratch? No matter the reason—and perhaps it’s as simple as the inability to imagine himself not working—Will continues on as he has been. “To hell in a hand-basket” is the phrase that pops into his head, one of his mother’s tidy dismissals, an announcement that she’s “washing her hands” (there’s another) of whatever mess it is.
    He knows its cause, or at least what he assumes has forced the development of his own lust into a drive he can no longer govern or contain, a drive that has pushed him beyond the boundary of what he used to recognize as himself. He can even guess, within a few days, the night of this catalyst’s arrival. Carole was sitting across from him at the dining room table, dinner long over, Samantha asleep, plates stacked in the sink. He was looking at the table’s surface, watching the arc of moisture left by the sponge as it evaporated, disappeared, looking at this rather than at his wife’s face when he asked her, “Are you
tired
?” Because it was at this moment that he decided it was time: a decent interval had passed. Or if not decent, then bearable. What exactly was the sexual etiquette of mourning? All he knew was he’d waited as long as he could, hating himself for the calculation and for possessing desire that was unkillable, and therefore indecent.
    Hesitant, afraid of causing insult, he didn’t ask the literal question but couched it as one of their oblique invitations for intercourse, that is, Are you
too
tired?
    Carole looked at him. “All right,” she said, taking no trouble to conceal that this would be what they call a mercy fuck, an indulgence of his need, a gift she could afford to give him.
    No, not afford.
Afford
belonged to the past, before the accident, when minor questions seemed to have answers of consequence.
What
restaurant? Which