the street and said, “Hello, Ethan,” as though he or she knew him personally. Though he often still wore T-shirts with kitschy silk-screened animation figures on them, some of his collared shirts were made of expensive textured materials that resembled the skins of Japanese lanterns. At the beginning of his success, Ash had encouraged him to shop in better places—real stores, not tables on street corners, she’d said—and after a while he’d even seemed to enjoy some of the clothes he owned, though he would not admit it.
Ethan had so many ideas that they were like Tourette’s syllables that needed to be spat out in chaotic yips and explosions. But many of them, even most of them, paid off in some way. After his success with the show was well established, he’d become an anti-child-labor activist in the mid-1990s and founded a school in Indonesia for children who’d been saved from labor. Alongside him Ash had become involved in this mission too, and their benevolence was genuine, not just a brief phase that soon bored them. Now Ethan was heading into the second year of the Mastery Seminars, a weeklong summer event he’d created at a resort in Napa, California, where politicians, scientists, Silicon Valley visionaries, and artists gave presentations about ideas in front of a privileged audience. The first year had been a success. Still several steps below other, similar conferences, the Mastery Seminars had gotten attention quickly. Even though it was only December now, the next season was already selling out.
Jules and Dennis Jacobson-Boyd read the 2009 Figman and Wolf Christmas letter one evening right before Christmas. New York City was in its annual crisis. Traffic didn’t move. Families from out of town, carrying blooms of shopping bags, meandered along sidewalks. Despite the decimated economy, people still came here for the holidays; they just couldn’t stay away. Canned music rang out in the streets, including those terrible 1950s Christmas novelty songs that made you “want to die,” as one of Jules’s clients had said to her that day. Everyone who lived in New York was weary, annoyed at the temporary occupation of their city, and forced into a state of imposed celebration. Jules had just gotten home from seeing her last client of the day and of the whole week. Years earlier, many therapists, including herself, had stopped using the word
patients
. Having
clients
still seemed a little unnatural, though; it made Jules feel that she was a businessperson, someone in, say, consulting, that vague field that she’d never really understood, though over the years through Ethan and Ash, she and Dennis had met people who made their livings this way. No one wanted to be a patient anymore; everyone wanted to be a client. More to the point, everyone wanted to be a consultant.
The last client on her schedule was Janice Kling; her name was a little amusing, considering that Janice did not want to leave therapy, ever. She clung marsupially, and her attachment was moving and sometimes unsettling. She had started seeing Jules many years earlier when she was in law school at NYU and had become frightened of the Socratic method, clobbered into silence when called upon by an intimidating professor. Now Janice, who’d initially imagined becoming an academic, had become an overstressed and underpaid lawyer for an environmental group. She worked long hours, trying to save the world from deregulation, but in Jules’s office she sank into the chair with slumped posture and a hopeless expression.
“I can’t stand living without intimacy,” Janice had said recently. “Going to meetings, fighting mean-spirited GOP legislation, then falling into bed alone and wolfing down leftover pad thai
at midnight. Even, you know, using a vibrator in my apartment, where I haven’t had a chance to put anything on the walls and it echoes. Is that pathetic to admit? Particularly the echoing vibrator part? Does it sound just, you know,
Ethan had so many ideas that they were like Tourette’s syllables that needed to be spat out in chaotic yips and explosions. But many of them, even most of them, paid off in some way. After his success with the show was well established, he’d become an anti-child-labor activist in the mid-1990s and founded a school in Indonesia for children who’d been saved from labor. Alongside him Ash had become involved in this mission too, and their benevolence was genuine, not just a brief phase that soon bored them. Now Ethan was heading into the second year of the Mastery Seminars, a weeklong summer event he’d created at a resort in Napa, California, where politicians, scientists, Silicon Valley visionaries, and artists gave presentations about ideas in front of a privileged audience. The first year had been a success. Still several steps below other, similar conferences, the Mastery Seminars had gotten attention quickly. Even though it was only December now, the next season was already selling out.
Jules and Dennis Jacobson-Boyd read the 2009 Figman and Wolf Christmas letter one evening right before Christmas. New York City was in its annual crisis. Traffic didn’t move. Families from out of town, carrying blooms of shopping bags, meandered along sidewalks. Despite the decimated economy, people still came here for the holidays; they just couldn’t stay away. Canned music rang out in the streets, including those terrible 1950s Christmas novelty songs that made you “want to die,” as one of Jules’s clients had said to her that day. Everyone who lived in New York was weary, annoyed at the temporary occupation of their city, and forced into a state of imposed celebration. Jules had just gotten home from seeing her last client of the day and of the whole week. Years earlier, many therapists, including herself, had stopped using the word
patients
. Having
clients
still seemed a little unnatural, though; it made Jules feel that she was a businessperson, someone in, say, consulting, that vague field that she’d never really understood, though over the years through Ethan and Ash, she and Dennis had met people who made their livings this way. No one wanted to be a patient anymore; everyone wanted to be a client. More to the point, everyone wanted to be a consultant.
The last client on her schedule was Janice Kling; her name was a little amusing, considering that Janice did not want to leave therapy, ever. She clung marsupially, and her attachment was moving and sometimes unsettling. She had started seeing Jules many years earlier when she was in law school at NYU and had become frightened of the Socratic method, clobbered into silence when called upon by an intimidating professor. Now Janice, who’d initially imagined becoming an academic, had become an overstressed and underpaid lawyer for an environmental group. She worked long hours, trying to save the world from deregulation, but in Jules’s office she sank into the chair with slumped posture and a hopeless expression.
“I can’t stand living without intimacy,” Janice had said recently. “Going to meetings, fighting mean-spirited GOP legislation, then falling into bed alone and wolfing down leftover pad thai
at midnight. Even, you know, using a vibrator in my apartment, where I haven’t had a chance to put anything on the walls and it echoes. Is that pathetic to admit? Particularly the echoing vibrator part? Does it sound just, you know,
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