FOURTEEN

I had only fifteen minutes to begin to digest what I’d just learned.

The lunchtime appointment that followed my Tuesday morning session with Gibbs belonged to a member of the local bar. Jim Zebid was a defense attorney, a litigator who also did occasional plaintiff’s work on malpractice claims. He had an interesting background, having been around the Boulder County criminal justice system working as a private investigator while putting himself through law school.

I’d been seeing him for a few months during the same Tuesday slot, and the therapeutic relationship continued to fascinate me. At times he was eager to spar with me over seeming inconsequentials; at other times I felt he would be content to curl up in my lap in parody of my foster poodle, Anvil. Not having a solid handle on one of my patients’ psychological profiles was nothing novel for me, but I found Jim Zebid a particularly interesting and perplexing man.

Since our first session I’d been working under the assumption that Jim chose me as a psychotherapist because I was married to a prosecutor whom he knew. His underlying motivation for making that choice? I wasn’t sure, but I felt confident that he and I would come around to it before too long. I suspected that it had to do with competition, or with secrets, or with some curious transference that would follow a serpentine trail back to his mother and his father.

Or maybe it had to do with all of the above.

Jim’s presenting problem was anxiety. His anxiety manifested itself in traditional ways: through nervousness, irritability, trouble sleeping, rumination, and occasional self-medication with alcohol and marijuana. By history, the present symptoms weren’t novel for him. Although only thirty-one, he’d suffered from anxiety problems since his days as an undergraduate at UCLA. Later, when the symptoms had aggravated during law school, he’d rationalized away the problems as stress-related. But the symptoms continued unabated, and Jim had recently, albeit reluctantly, come to the conclusion that something more intrinsic might be responsible for his chronic misery.

Early on I referred him to a psychiatrist for a medication consultation. The Xanax Jim was prescribed had succeeded not only in taking the edge off his symptoms but in making him more psychologically available for the insight work that he insisted he wanted to do with me. Occasionally, though, I thought that his anxiety still proved an impediment to psychotherapy, and I wasn’t quite sure about the ultimate efficacy of the Xanax.

For a few weeks I’d been weighing asking the prescribing psychiatrist to consider an anxiolytic antidepressant instead.

The session after Gibbs’s second individual appointment was one of those days when I wasn’t so sure about Jim Zebid’s desire to work.

I admit that he didn’t have one hundred percent of my attention. Although most days I prided myself on my ability to move from one patient to the next with the clarity of flipping channels on a TV remote, Gibbs’s most recent revelations were still clouding my focus that morning. I was making a conscious effort to fight through the static of Gibbs’s serial killer accusation so that I could make certain that Jim had a sufficient quantity of my concentration.

“Anyway, my client says he sold half an ounce of blow to Judge Heller’s husband. My guy is only up for an aggravated burglary, and I’m not sure I want to complicate things by revealing he’s dealing, so I’m not sure what the hell I’m going to do with the information. But you have to admit it’s something. Too bad it’s not Judge Heller’s case.”

Jara Heller was the youngest judge on the District Court bench. I knew her socially-in the sense that I could have picked her out in a crowded room. I wasn’t sure I could say the same about her husband, although I felt it was likely that I had met him at some legal affair or reception or cocktail party over the years. For all I knew he and I may have commiserated or shared a look of mutually felt angst while fulfilling our spousal obligations by our attendance.

“Still…” Jim said, apparently continuing to muse over the illusion of leverage that came with knowing that a young judge’s husband used cocaine and purchased it in quantities large enough to suggest that he sold some, too.

The look on Jim’s face reminded me of a guy who’d just witnessed a wallet crammed with bills spill from a woman’s purse and was wondering how he could rationalize clipping a few fifties before he handed the billfold back to its owner.

Most days I don’t hear a single fact during psychotherapy that would be meaningful to anyone other than my patient, me, and a limited circle of people who happen to share my patient’s plot in the universe. But that day? I’d already heard an update from a wanted woman, a report about a serial killer, and news about a judge’s husband possibly selling cocaine, and I hadn’t even given a thought to my midday meal.