Other people

Six Koch

A first meeting is for me always a difficult acting role. I spend so many of my working hours being passively sympathetic. As the patient explores his thoughts, I grunt neutral sounds. I listen the way a neighbor or a friend does, forming my own perceptions. I remember the Baumgarten woman telling me I sounded like a big teddy bear, a larger version of the stuffed animal of her childhood to whom she talked for comfort. We are so lonely in our anguish that talking to a willing listener is itself therapeutic, and if the listener is a priest or a doctor, who knows, perhaps his experience of listening to so many private torments that are, at heart, so similar, perhaps the listener will have something useful to say in the end.

Yet if the person I am seeing for the first time is another doctor's patient upset at his transference, ready to switch allegiances, interviewing me to see if I am acceptable, I must seem to be harsh, cold, uncaring, a stone wall that talks back. And if the person who has come to see me is not the patient, but a father like Mr. Widmer who acts as if he knows his own high place in the world and has come to deliver his daughter over to the psychological zookeeper, I am an actor again. He is used to businessmen who smile when they feel derision, but he is not used to the idea of a doctor who sees through his great surface calm. A Jew, a Greek, an Italian would have wailed about the plight of his daughter. Widmer speaks calmly — I would like to know what his pulse was, I would like to have seen his electroencephalogram. He flatters me, he says he comes to me by reading a piece of my work, am I to believe that? Somewhere in his mind, when he comes to visit me, he is trading down. His child has fallen from grace. She has terrible insomnia. She has betrayed the Wasp ethic of control. Am I to do some Freudian hocus-pocus so that she will become acceptable again to her mother and father?

In three minutes Widmer reveals that he is a lawyer who is not a lawyer. He is not a Clarence Darrow spellbinding a jury, he is a businessman who takes money for writing the same contracts over and over again, changing the names of the parties, the terms, it doesn't matter, he will never shake the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, yet he lusts after that excitement in the law and hangs on to it by a vicarious thread to an Armenian who is a real lawyer! Then, in the next few minutes, he betrays that in his mind — where else does man fornicate except in his mind?! — he is a lover to his daughter and a pastor to his wife. Is this none of my business except that it arms me now to deal with the girl?

I come out to the waiting room for my first look at Francine Widmer.

"How do you do?" she says, standing.

She is as tall as I am, blond, with unusual bone structure in her face. I wonder what her father thinks of the touch of oriental in her eyes. A distant ancestor? A mutation?

"I am pleased to meet you," I say, shaking her hand. "Please come in."

She has looked directly at me. Good.

We are standing in my study at the moment of greatest discomfort. "We will have a talk first," I say.

"Shall I sit here?" she says, pointing to the chair in which her father sat during our interview.

"Yes, please."

Am I imagining she slides her body into the chair as if it is an intimate act? I notice the naturalness of the shape of her breasts. Marta wore a brassiere always, a girdle always. It was the times.

She crosses her legs in defense of the flower. Better than the subway-riding women, sitting legs apart, unwanted. She tosses her hair. I expect it is lovely to touch.

"Our actual sessions," I explain, "will be with you lying down."

I have said this so often, and yet this time the words lying down simmer with an expectation that sounds sexual. What is this, Gunther?

I know of an actual case, a father who was himself a doctor, who had a heart attack at his beautiful daughter's wedding reception. Everyone thought of him as the happy father giving her hand in marriage, but he was in the darkness of his mind the dismissed suitor, haunted by the guilt of his illegitimate claim, now seeing his daughter's body claimed forever by a legitimate lover. What a heart it takes to adjust to that! But that was long ago. Marta and I thought of ourselves as brave revolutionaries, having intercourse four months before marriage, mingling in a sweat of excitement that would have brought apoplexy to our parents. Now Widmer and I live in a world where children — why do we still think of them as children?! — openly fornicate, shocking even those of us who were trained to think that our lusts are natural and the restrictions of society unnatural.

If I think poor Widmer am I not also thinking poor Koch? Isn't Widmer a warning to myself? I, too, walk around in camouflage, showing the world what? a passive teddy bear listening?

I am older than Widmer by three years at least, a widower who sees no one, who rolls on the screen of his mind nostalgic movies about his dead wife, who sublimates by immersing himself in helping other people realize themselves, and who has talked himself into believing he no longer lusts, this man, Koch, sees a twenty-seven-year-old girl and feels his loins tingle for the first time in how long? How can I say of Widmer that he confuses his wife and his daughter when his daughter has the same effect on me? With less cause. Widmer has seen this Francine since a baby, watched her naked body grow lean, her legs lengthen, her breasts develop into pearls, her hips widen, her childhood lope become that walk she had when she walked into this office. I accuse Widmer's accuser of carnality! Of being human still at sixty!

How many patients have I seen in my lifetime, a thousand, and at the center of how many, most, yes most, it is the urgency of the testicles, the hungry labia that we come to. They say they have come to therapy because they have difficulty communicating with people, they have trouble keeping jobs, they have trouble keeping wives and husbands, they have nightmares, they take pills too much, and when we peel the onion away, we are left God's clever little motor for forcing us to procreate, a penis looking for a home, a home looking for a penis. The rest is culture.

"You have insomnia?" I ask.

"Very bad, I'm afraid."

"We must probe for the cause," I say.

Probe. Another word invested with meaning. What is this?

I have friends among analysts who talked seriously for a while that the sexual revolution was going to put us out of business. I laughed at them! The open ambiguity of our sexual natures now gives us more cases to deal with, the closet doors are opening up not to admit a minority into the light, we are finding out that almost all of humanity was packed in there, behind some door. What is our own Freud become, a blind genius who thought women envied him his penis! We are always beginning all over again.

I, at sixty, must take time for a new patient, myself, to find out why for the years since Marta died I have pretended to be a eunuch, my sexual life over, why it took this other new patient, Francine Widmer, to in one minute make God's little motor in my groin start humming? We are the physicians, the patients trust us, they put themselves into our power for therapy, we cannot abuse our power, we cannot involve ourselves in their sexual lives! Yet that is a lie, we do, we do!

For my generation, psychoanalysis is a last resort. My friends get involved in things like transcendental meditation. Some of them have gone for weekend retreats at one of these places where you purge your soul in groups, but I can't think of one that took up the couch. Why waste the time and money? I wasn't interested in getting into a maze to find myself. I was into other people from the moment I got to Radcliffe.

My parents' idea of Cambridge and Boston comes from old books. What a difference! With all the colleges up there, including my own, it was a great place to find exotics, by which I mean people who weren't like Mom and Dad. My mother's melting pot consisted of Republican ladies. And my father joined clubs where they didn't let the other kinds in. In a big zoo like Boston, you want to look at what's in the other cages.

When I was a kid, whenever we were someplace my mother used to call "public," like a public swimming pool, and some kid would get up on the high diving board and cross himself before take-off, my mother would look at my father as if she were tolerating somebody who picked his nose. Well, the Cambridge they sent me to was littered with some of these cross-yourself Mediterranean-type Catholics, some of whom went to churches that were decorated on the inside like pinball machines. Our Presbyterian church, even when it's got people in it, looks like it needs dusting. I met Jewish kids at Harvard who kept running off at the mouth with an intensity that scared you till you got used to it. They didn't know that intensity was not nice, that if you had anything to say, you ought to say it quietly, using words that won't upset anybody. I don't mean there weren't Protestants at school who weren't into this and that with feeling, but the Jewish kids, hell, they were into everything as if being into was the thing and not the subject matter. Also in Cambridge I met a lot of et ceteras, Greeks, Irish girls pure enough to have freckles all over and real red hair.

It was exciting being in a big pond full of strange animals. The variety itself kept my adrenaline up through those late-night rap sessions, but late hours and insomnia are a poor mix. It was at Radcliffe that I started envying people who slept all night, or who could sleep in the mornings. I couldn't even sleep into Sunday mornings. I marked a passage in Kafka's Diaries: "Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

After graduation, my father gave me a blessed six months in Europe and I didn't miss a single night's sleep. Was that a clue?

I roomed with some girls in New York, drifted from job to job, and the insomnia came galloping back. I needed an anchor. A job or a man or both? My interests had something of an international flavor even then, so I put on a dress, poked around the U.N. and, to my surprise, getting a good job was easier than I thought because I looked so straight, Wasp nose. Ivy League references, accent okay, I was a lady!

With insomnia.

The U.N. wasn't at all like Cambridge. All those exotic types straight out of the National Geographic were actors, I mean they didn't behave the way they must've at home, they all acted like they were trying to be Henry Cabot Lodge. Sure there were real ones here and there, like that Russian sun freak from Moscow who used to take his shirt off in fur-coat weather if the sun was out. He kept complaining that the U.S. wouldn't let him go to Florida when he had a weekend off and wanted to know when we'd become a free country! I once asked him if he was an MVD agent — what the hell, there's no harm in asking — and he said he was the only member of the delegation who wasn't — I mean he had a sense of humor. I was also amused by those bucks from Africa who used polysyllabic English tongue-twisters incorrectly and frequently, you couldn't get a straight, simple sentence out of them. And real Arabs, no American girl should skip the experience of one date with a genuine Arab, especially one who's super polite and is desperate because he hasn't gotten laid since Saudi Arabia, that is an experience. Growing up in Westchester sure doesn't prepare you for living in the world.

I am not cynical. I am trying to nail down for myself what's real. It is one hundred percent true that the guys who make the speeches in the Assembly are Charlie McCarthys who don't believe most of what they move their lips with — listen, I know the guys who write their speeches. What you have in the General Assembly is like a Hollywood cocktail party where everybody knows everybody else is lying but they've got to make believe with each other, it's their thing. What most of my friends' bosses at the U.N. are into — wherever they come from — is having a good time in New York for two or three years, being called Mr. Ambassador by head waiters, having DPL license plates that enable you to park in the middle of traffic and get away with it, where can you get that kind of power back in the jungle where everybody else is like you? It's the fastest race for class mobility I know. The U.N. is packed with monkeys hurrying to get their nuts off, their booze drunk, and some money squirreled away before they are crated up and sent back to Stink, or whatever their country is called.

I was doing fine, enjoying myself, especially after I got myself transferred to X. X is what he was called. His real job was not writing speeches for the American Ambassador to the U.N., but drafting a so-called political memorandum that was used by the speech writer. X was the Mission's contact with the intelligence services, which is why I had to wait all those months for a clearance though I was really working for him in the meantime anyway, unofficially but getting paid. Even the Ambassador called him X sometimes, jokingly of course. I was his assistant, which meant I did his shit work. X said that I didn't have what he called a proper command of the language but since nobody under thirty did according to him and he thought I was smart, he would give me a batch of stuff that had come in and say something like, "Pull out the content." Five thousand words of garbage and he'd trust me to find if there was anything of substance and I'd give him three or four items, one line each, and X would say, "Smart lady" and pat me on the head, the pig. I did the digging, I did the choosing, and he dictated it to his secretary and claimed the credit. Of course I resented him, making three hundred and twenty percent of what I make. Yes, it's my first real job, yes he's older, yes he's got a wife and two kids to support, but why three hundred and twenty percent for what I do? If the crunch came — Washington is always threatening cutbacks in staff — he'd can me politely. But the work would still have to be done. He'd have to hire another me eventually, security clearance and all, so he might as well hang on to the original. That's my job security.

Once after a day of doing X's bidding only to find out he'd forgotten one significant part of his instruction and when he told me, sorry, I'd have to wade through that crap all over again, I let out some expletive and he said, "Why do you resent being a woman?" and I told him wearily, "Because I can't pee standing up." I'll find a way of telling him how I feel about that three hundred and twenty percent and a lot of other things the moment he makes that first pass, and he will, he will.

Well, here I was being X's digestive system — I have to admit I liked the actual work — and everything's going fine except the insomnia I had in Radcliffe comes back in spades. I'd go to sleep and within an hour, sometimes within ten minutes, I'd be awake, tired, blood-eyed. I tried reading things I hated, I tried hot cocoa, I tried some Indian system where you relax one muscle at a time. I began to wear dark glasses indoors to hide my eyes.

One weekend my friend from Radcliffe, Betsy Thorne, stayed over. At two in the morning I was sitting on the edge of my bed, nodding but not enough to sleep, desperate, when Betsy awoke. She came over to sit beside me.

"What's the matter, hon?" she said.

I told her it was nothing new, that it'd been going on for months, that I'd had it for a while in school, but now it was much worse.

"You'll kill yourself fighting it," Betsy said.

"I don't know what to do."

Betsy rummaged around in her bag and came up with the bottle of reds. I knew what they were.

"Try one," she said. "It works for me."

I took it with me to the bathroom, saying I was getting a cup of water, but my intention was really to flush it down and pretend to have taken it. When I saw my face in the mirror, the purple circles under my red eyes, I thought what the hell and swallowed the capsule.

We talked for a bit. Betsy said there was nothing to worry about as long as I didn't drink alcohol before taking them. Twenty minutes later I was yawning, and when I fell asleep I slept straight through. In the morning Betsy was gone but had left me three or four reds on my night table.

I had to scramble to find a steady source. My damn so-called doctor was the family's doctor and I knew he wouldn't approve. I thought of going to another doctor, please can I have some Seconals, and decided I'd rather pay more and skip the hypocrisy. Soon I was into two a night, then two when I went to sleep and one more when I woke up after a few hours, and once I found myself taking two more when I woke up, and I knew I was in trouble.

I was at my parents' house for one of my rare sleepovers when my mother, doing me a favor and unpacking my canvas duffel while I chitchatted with Dad down below, saw the downers and told me, away from Dad's hearing, about the time she was on them. It was as if she was confessing to having been a streetwalker or something. We just can't imagine our parents into drugs a long time ago.

"Your father was away at a convention for a week. When he returned," she said, "he didn't, well, he wasn't loving the way he usually was after a time away. He kept to his side of the bed. I stayed awake longer and longer, unable not to think. The doctor prescribed the Seconal. He cautioned me to take only one. But I'd wake in a few hours and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'd take another. Then one wouldn't get me to sleep, so I took two, and then another one when I woke in the middle of the night, and if I woke toward morning, I couldn't take just lying there in bed with your father asleep, and I'd take another, and then when it was time to get up I was foggy, and then when I told the doctor, he suggested I try Benzedrine in the morning, and it drove me nearly crazy. I decided I had to quit all of it. I had the most awful withdrawal symptoms. Your father was very sympathetic. He used to cradle me in his arms at night. As it turned out, his affection was my cure. The pills camouflaged the problem."

It was a short road from that conversation to Dr. Koch. Those early sessions were like root canal work, except the canal was my memory. Dr. Koch wanted me to see if I could remember the very first time I had awakened and couldn't get back to sleep. Had I been dreaming? I didn't remember. What were you thinking about before you went to sleep? How could I remember, it was so long ago? You will remember, he said. Be patient.

The first time I was really glad to be in therapy was when the rape happened. People don't understand that when something like that hits you, what you want to do is get rid of the disgust by laying it on the table in front of someone. I never expected Koch to be a son of a bitch the way he was that night. He was supposed to be helping me!

When I was a kid I always expected doctors to look like my father. World War II type haircuts, narrow ties, how-do-you-dos every time they saw you. Not that they really looked alike, but they all seemed to have noses that were going to turn into those long thin ones on Modigliani's sculptures, breathing tubes, no bridge, barely visible except as a line down the middle of the face. I'm not exaggerating. If you listened to them talking to my father it sounded like they had all taken speech lessons in the same class. Well, when you get used to doctors looking or acting in one particular way and then you go to see a doctor who looks like Koch, it blows your preconceptions.

Dr. Koch was a big old blob of a man, shaggy hair bushed up, and his nose was more W. C. Fields than Valentino. Maybe that sounds unfair, because all of his pieces fit, and I've got to admit his eyes, with those bushy grey brows growing in all directions, were all soul. I did look him over that first time. He wore a tie as if it was an impediment to free breathing; he kept the knot an inch or two from his neck. He wore sandals. Whoever heard of a doctor wearing sandals?

He stonewalled me the first time, just at the beginning, as if it was a technique, keeping his distance, but he noticed I was looking him over as a person, and before the hour was up he relaxed, smiled, like an instant friend saying okay, let's talk.

It was the second hour when I sensed him looking at me. I don't mean my face. I mean all of me. Do people that age fuck regularly? I guess we always think people stop at some point until we get to that point. Betsy Thorne fucked a much older man when she was a sophomore, some friend of her father's she met in the street when she was in L.A. and he said aren't you Betsy Thorne, what are you doing so far from home, and she said what are you doing so far from home, and then he asked her to dinner, why not, what kind of dinner, she doesn't care, he takes her to a topless place on the strip, and Betsy thinks so that's what Dad's friends do out of town. The food, Betsy said, was yuch, but the drinks were okay, and the show was something else, much better-looking girls than she'd expected to do that kind of thing, and he said some of them go to UCLA, and then she wonders why, when the meal's over, he doesn't put the napkin on the table, has he got an erection, she's thinking, and anyway, they end up in his hotel, and she said it was miles different than the guys at school, slow, you know what I mean, a fantastically long build-up. She got me going just talking about it. Of course it intrigued me, I think it does most girls who aren't cheerleaders chasing jocks. Someone else's old man might satisfy my curiosity. You see, it's Koch looking at me that way that got me thinking about it all again, because with all my previous thinking I never fell into the circumstance, and it didn't seem something I wanted to pursue especially. What we do is try to retailor life. I would have wanted Koch to be just a bit younger, maybe just less round in the middle, I have a strange feeling about a pot, as if it's just a little obscene. And I worry suppose he couldn't get it up, it would be awful. I wouldn't feel it was my fault, but you never can tell how you feel until something like that happens. Anyway, Koch never made a pass at me that whole year. I thought about him from time to time when I was lying there on the couch. I censored at first, I'd tell him what I was thinking, but I'd skip the things I was thinking about him, and then, shit, I told him because he said always tell everything, that's what analysis is, following the meanderings to find out what it's all about. I wish I had seen his face when I told him the first time, but he sits in back of me, you know, and he's just a voice grunting now and again.

The truth is that telling Koch about my thinking about him wasn't as bad as telling him the details when I was having that affair with the French interpreter at the U.N. What I wanted to say was I'm involved with this French person who works where I do and let it go at that, but it doesn't work that way because you talk about yesterday. Yesterday I did this and I did that, and I thought, I'm making Koch jealous, it's cruel to him to tell him about my being in bed with someone else when that's probably where he wants to be, and he just takes it like he takes everything, yes, go on, and then what happened? God you have to be like God to be an analyst sometimes! He wants me to tell him everything that's on my mind, and if nothing's on my mind, he says well yesterday, what did you do, and we're off and soon I'm talking about Bill.

Bill Acton, I regret to report, is the son of an old friend of my father's from Yale. We met under the worst of circumstances, my parents were throwing a between-Christmas-and-New-Year's party at the house and it's their idea of conviviality to have young people — that's what they call us, young people — invited also, so it's a familylike party. Only what happens is that the parents congregate together getting sloshed and the young people, if they can stand each other, smoke dope in an upstairs room. What struck me about Bill was his shyness. The other fellows who were about my age were all coming on the same way they used to in college, jocks-with-cocks looking for an opening, and Bill just sat there. I don't like wallflowers, female or male, but I happened to ask Bill something and his answer was a quote from Auden. I mean he didn't say it pretentiously, just as if it was the right answer. I guess I was also flattered by the fact that he assumed I'd know, that I wasn't just an opening for his oil rig, I was a person with a brain.

Well, we talked a lot that evening, and when the adults were ready to go home, Bill didn't offer to take me somewhere for a drink, meaning something else of course, he shook hands. Sure there's something terribly square and old-fashioned about that, and I guess all I thought at the time was that Bill was not boring and he's the kind of guy you could bring home if you had to (can you imagine my bringing the Frenchman from the U.N. home? My father'd have had a heart attack!). So when he was leaving I said call me. That's all.

Well, of course he called my home and Mom told him I don't live at home and gave him my phone number, and we got together for the movies, we went on a picnic believe it or not, I found out he liked rock and classical just like me, and then one Saturday we had dinner at Adam's Apple, which I sometimes go to to get away from the U.N. crowd at lunch, and we had no particular plans for afterwards, so we walked downtown and then West, and before you know it, we're in pornsville, and when he realized it, I swear he blushed. The theater right in front of us was playing Behind the Green Door. He asked me did I know what kind of a film it was, and I said yes, Betsy Thorne described it scene by scene to me. The box office was manned by a Puerto-Rican-looking woman. We were about five feet from her, and she was looking Bill right in the eyeball when he said to me, "Let's not."

I could hear the woman whisper "Chicken shit."

Bill walked closer to her cage and said, "What did you say?"

"Nothing," said the woman.

I took Bill by the arm and said, "Let's go." We walked quite a while before he talked. He said he'd seen a couple of films like that some time ago and really didn't care for them, they made sex seem mechanical and impersonal.

"But did you find them exciting?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "It gets you going and stops you at the same time because it's so crude. Did you ever get a tan from a sunlamp?"

I hadn't.

"Well, I have," Bill said, "and it's not the same as getting it from the sun. It feels artificial. That's what I'm talking about."

I knew all about his ambivalence because I was churning over some of my own. A fellow couldn't be nicer than Bill. Bill was reliable. A friend. A nonthreatening friend. I asked him did he ever lose his temper, and he said he tried to control his temper. I told him about my insomnia, and he looked at me as if I were reporting on outer space. He always slept. It's not that I'm afraid of perfect people. I'm leery of my reaction to them.

Eventually we wound our way back to Bill's car. When we got to my place, I invited him up for a drink, and for a moment I thought he was going to beg off, but I said, "There's a parking place right in front. A New Yorker can't turn down an empty parking place, can he?"

Upstairs he hung his jacket up on a chair. I put a record on and brought out a half-gallon jug of Gallo's Hearty Burgundy and a couple of glasses. Bill did the pouring as if it were his role.

I tried to get him to talk about himself, and finally he told me about his year-long leading-to-marriage kind of thing that broke up. She sounded like a very nice person, a perfect match. She took up with someone Bill described as mean. Isn't that the way the ball bounces?

I asked him if he'd ever smoked dope. He nodded. I wanted to say Good for you. So I went to my stash and brought us a joint. Neither of us was a cigarette smoker, and we had a lot of trouble inhaling. It was a bit comical. He seemed happy that I was sharing the embarrassment as well as the joint. It relaxed him, I could tell, and I felt he was making something erotic out of passing the joint from his lips to my lips, back and forth. Suddenly he excused himself and went to the John. When he came back his breath smelled of toothpaste. I knew Bill was the kind of person who would never use someone else's toothbrush. What did he use, his finger?

When I offered a second joint, Bill volunteered to reimburse me for it and I told him not to be silly.

"It's funny," he said, not looking at me, "before the wine and dope I was wondering what a person like you saw in a person like me, but now I'm feeling pretty good about myself," and he tried to put his arms around me.

"No," I said.

He took his arms back immediately.

"I like you," I said. "But not that way."

He looked so crestfallen I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss it, but anything physical at that point could have been misinterpreted.

I didn't pass the joint back. "Not if you're driving soon," I said.

"I better go," said good Bill.

"Yes. I enjoyed your company."

"Thanks for the wine. And the…" He pointed to the joint I was still holding. Then he fled.

I felt like a shit. What would have been so awful if I had gone to bed with him? The Frenchman didn't misinterpret it, a fuck was a fuck. But Bill would have, wouldn't he?

The following afternoon, lying on Dr. Koch's couch, I described the evening with Bill in minute detail. I am listening to myself tell it as if I'm a Christian martyr. I felt I was inches away from grasping something about myself. Dr. Koch interrupted my silence to say, "What are you thinking?" and I said I was reciting the evening with Bill to make Koch jealous.

I could hear the clock ticking in Koch's study.

For a long time he said nothing. Finally, I heard a deep sigh.

"Do you feel guilty about what you said?"

I didn't answer.

"You did nothing terrible," he said.

I come here for insight, not for absolution. I didn't want to talk.

"What are you thinking?" he insisted.

"Nothing," I lied. "Nothing, nothing, nothing."

Before Marta died, for almost all of the thirty-four years of our marriage, every Saturday morning when weather permitted, we would go out shopping together. In the early years it was often just window shopping, discussing with high seriousness which of two armchairs we would buy for my den, knowing we would never decide between the two and have to look for a third because there was not enough money to buy something as frivolous as a comfortable place for me to sit. But when I had paid off my debts from medical school and from the early years of transposing myself to this country, we used whatever was left after food and rent not to save — how could we save for the future when we had so much to make up for the past? — but to spend with a vengeance against the forces that had denied us!

When we go on a shopping spree not for what we need but for what we want, we find we still have the reckless joy of children somewhere inside bursting out. I remember the day Marta and I splurged — we felt like kings — buying our first wall-to-wall carpeting for the living room and hallway to replace the second-hand rugs, threadbare from the feet of our only son, Kurt, and his friends, and our friends, and our own feet, and from the feet of patients without count, coming and going.

I remember the crazy delight we took in buying an electric orange juice squeezer — this was before the days of frozen juice — because I drink orange juice the way Americans drink Coca-Cola and it pained me to see Marta squeeze each orange half, the palm of her right hand turning it against the serrations of a glass squeezer that had cost twenty-five cents in Woolworth's when we were first married. For Kurt, when he was eight, we committed the ultimate extravagance. We bought him a new dress coat and a new lined jacket for playing street hockey, even though we knew he could wear them only one season before his limbs were too long.

These Saturday-morning escapades into department stores were our chief form of recreation. Never once in all those years did I think of patients during the time that Marta and I were out. Only when we came back home, exhilarated and exhausted eye-consumers, did I slump into my armchair, put my feet up on the ottoman, and think of my Worry Number One, Higgins, the only patient I had who could be a murderer in fact and not just in heart. Three times a week I would wait for his first words on the couch, wondering had something finally happened, had he been unable to control his desire to beat another human to death with his bare hands. Higgins was a strong man, capable, quick-tempered, a boss of truck drivers. Thank God he found a prostitute with well-padded buttocks who let him spank her with his hand till relief came. I told Higgins he should save the money he spent on me and just see that woman as often as he needed. When you think of the millions of aberrant and lonely persons over the course of human history who have found some release among prostitutes — those great actresses who understood human aberration long before Sacher-Masoch or Krafft-Ebing, we have cause to be grateful. It is possible that prostitution has done more than medicine for mankind, and with fewer mistakes that have converted a minor affliction into death by surgery and malpractice.

All right, I am meandering. Since Marta died, the Saturday shopping ritual continues without heart. What am I to buy, new carpeting when the old will outlive me? And so I buy light bulbs, Kleenex boxes, toilet tissue, soap, all with the excuse that it is very inconvenient to run out of such things, but what would another analyst make of my collection of such items? Of my need to pretend to shop when there is nothing I really have to buy? Why do I not go on weekends to visit my grandchild? Because our son Kurt married a young woman who had already had a needless hysterectomy, and I have asked was this to spite us, a willful attack, to deprive me of grandchildren?

The truth is that I have developed Worry Number Two, a patient who occupies my thoughts on weekends, not a murderer, not a suicide, but Francine Widmer, whose source of difficulty I now understand and am possibly postponing, dragging out her own understanding of the problem, because I do not want her to stop coming to me because I am infatuated with this baby of twenty-seven. Please understand, ever since Marta's passing, I go to dinner parties, pushed by friends to meet eligible widows, it doesn't work, it would be a housekeeping arrangement, I would constantly be making comparisons to Marta, whose shadows are still in every corner of my mind. But this young woman, Francine, is not in any way like Marta, and I have tried to tie off the waves of stimulation that flow from her without success. I daydream that I am licking the palm of her hand, it is a disgrace for a man my age, I must control this urge, I must arrange for her to see another analyst even though we are on the verge of success, I cannot give her up. I ask myself, does she know? Of course a person always knows. It would be easier for me to marry one of the widows than to act out my fantasies for this young woman.

I have a confession. Not too long ago — why do I say that? I remember the exact date of course! — I was at a matchmaking dinner contrived by my friend Herman, when he is called to the hospital — his wife says it always happens — to deliver another inconveniently timed baby, and when Herman stops talking, the dinner party died. I tried to keep the conversation flowing, and finally the widow says we had better say good night, would I drop her off, so we walk the few blocks to her apartment, and she says come up, so I go, and when we get there, without fuss, she takes me to her bed. The widow is an ordinary woman of her age, fifty-something, not too bad looking, a bit thin, she is on estrogen, full of hope, my testicles are as full as those of a stud bull whose farmer has closed the fence and thrown the key away. So I do what is asked, and all the time I am thinking of Francine, her face, what her body must look like, what it would feel to be doing this and that to her. The widow asks will I see her again, I am a careful lover, her face shines, I have provided her as well as myself with relief, and I promise to call, knowing I am not likely to call because the widow bores me and I am a poor actor who cannot sustain a role for too long.

Within a week, I am rumbling about the house, looking through old books read long ago, when I get a phone call after my last patient has said good night, and I think aha, it is the widow, but when I answer it is Francine, she is half talking, half sobbing, and she tells me that a man has violated the orifice I coveted. This is not what she tells me, of course, this is what I think, I try to reassure her, but my heart is pounding wildly as if she is telling me about a crime against myself. I ask her if she has gone to a hospital, I tell her to go, I ask her if she has called the police, I advise her to do so after the hospital, and to please call me afterward, I will wait for her call (what else do I have to do?). She asks me to go to the hospital and the police with her, she wants to come see me now, first, and I tell her, coward that I am, that I cannot, has she told her father, she says she can't, and then I think of that young man she has been dating — whom I despise out of sheer jealousy of his age — and she says in anger yes, that is what she will do, slamming down the phone.

Years ago I devised a quick remedy for when tension ties my insides into knots. On my desk I keep three well-balanced English darts in a holder. When I open the closet door in my study, hanging on the back is the same dart board I have been using as long as I can remember. When you pick up the darts and take aim, your concentration is one thing only, moving the right arm forward with a snap to release the dart headed for as close to the bull's-eye as you can. And then there is the second and the third. You see your score, and in a moment you are plucking the darts out to show yourself that you can improve the result. Darts are addictive. You never throw just one. And before you know it, you have recreated yourself. And there is not, as with other recreations, a mess to clean up afterwards; just to close the closet door, and put the three darts back in the holder on the desk.

This evening my throwing of the darts is not entirely successful, because as I throw I cannot put completely out of my mind a petition to the absent Francine. I don't want her to continue her anger at me. Long after I have put away the darts, the phone rings again. It is the young man calling for her, I agree to see her though it is very late. It is in this moment of crisis that the cause of her insomnia comes surging into her memory. I am delighted, even though the cost of the revelation is this hideous thing. It is out in the open, and what do I do? I find myself lecturing instead of soothing her. Is this a form of attack because of her unfaithfulness to me, with the boy Bill and with the rapist?

In the silence after she leaves, I sit in my bathrobe into the night, trying to define my worthlessness this evening. I am not her father, her lover, I am her therapist, I must help her, I hope I do not love her, she has become a sexual affliction for me, I am afraid I adore her unreasonably, I must give her up as a patient, I cannot give her up, I must have the help of the Deity now in exchange for whatever promises will buy surcease.