“Do you know who it is?”

“If I did,” she said evenly, “why should I tell you?”

She hadn’t spoken in a harsh tone, but the words cut me, and I felt a hot rush come to my face. In that instant I was hurt far beyond what I knew to be reasonable. The words because it’s my house appeared in my mind, but I suppressed them. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “I’ll leave now.”

I let myself out without looking at her. She would have to lock the gate from the inside, but I didn’t bother to remind her. Upstairs, as I made myself some chicken sausages and mashed potatoes, I replayed the encounter over and over again. Why should she tell me? What was I to her? The landlord. The shrink upstairs who had befriended her kid. A really tall white guy with the hots for her, or worse: a busybody, an old woman butting into the neighbor’s business. I knew I was vulnerable to these blows, even when they were minor. In analytic-speak, my narcissistic balance had been thrown off, a wound reopened. Pride, I thought, the Davidsen curse. That hurt stayed through the evening and reappeared for days afterward when I had a moment to remember. I blessed the commute, my full days of patients, the hundreds of articles I was behind on reading, the Empathy Conference the following weekend with its good papers and bad ones. I blessed Laura Capelli, fellow analyst and Park Slope neighbor who had flirted with me over doughnuts before the first speaker that Saturday and given me her card. “If we run low on empathy,” she quipped, “we can always refuel on guilt. That’s next month.” And I blessed Ms. W., one of my patients, because she had started to pain rather than bore me. The pangs I felt as I listened suggested that something was stirring in Ms. W., and after months of attending to her precise, uninflected dissections of her co-workers’ habits at the advertising agency and her intellectualized versions of her childhood, I had welcomed the slight but definite color of anger in her voice. “He looked at me as if I didn’t exist,” she said.

I BECAME DESPONDENT, my father wrote, when Roger began to unpack his wardrobe: suits, sports jackets, slacks, sweaters, neckties, pajamas, etc. He mounted each garment on a hanger, held up each piece for viewing, and then hung it in his closet with the solemnity of a religious rite. When he ran out of closet room, I said he could fill out my unused space, hoping that visitors might take his clothes for mine. In this new environment I was ashamed of my poverty and did what I could to disguise it. Least of all did I talk about it. Today I am ashamed that I was ashamed. My first impression of Martin Luther College? A grand style show.