Gary the name, it said. Another: Tell Suzy no. I wondered over this Suzy—for what was she being refused? And what madness made San Franciscans dump the details of their daily lives with such abandon, such delight?
Finally came the dead day of the New Year itself, the whole world shut and sleeping—a Wednesday, but without the patient. I dared not even turn on my torn radio with its drifting tuner for fear of the dark reports that might issue therefrom; and of the static, the curtain of electronic noise that resembled too closely the whir of the hated sound machine.
I went to the office early on the following Wednesday, January 8th, hoping beyond hope that Dr. Schussler’s Christmas hiatus was for but two weeks, not the three that my own nefarious practitioners had always taken, leaving me adrift at the worst time of year. (And why do they do that? What other profession absents itself exactly at the moment its services will be most needed, when patients are confronted with the absurdly neurotic idea that family holidays should make them happy? Would a medical doctor go on leave after a plane crash?) Only silence reigned in the adjoining office, and I passed the week scouring the halls, peering into offices where real people seemed to be going about the actual acts of living.
I cannot describe the feverish excitement with which I prepared to go to the office on Wednesday, January 15th. I bathed elaborately; shaved, even my chest, determined that my presence in Room 807 should be so slight as to leave not a scintilla of odor-inducing molecules upon the air. I sat still, so still as to be nearly incorporeal. I had survived her absence without deathly consequence. Any moment she would return and release me.
And finally it happened as always: elevator, ding, footfalls, slam of the door. (Oh, how I loved her slam now, the force of her very arms!)
And how was your vacation? asked Dr. Schussler.
Oh, my God, said the patient. I can barely describe it. It was … beyond belief. I can’t thank you enough.
Ah! said the therapist. You finally swam in the sea.
That’s not quite it, said the patient.
She paused. And lowered her voice. And said:
I had the best sex I’ve ever had in my life.
45.
The story the patient went on to tell was so direct, so … specific in its descriptions, that my male member grew—I should say “sprang”—at a rate unlike any other time in my experience.
She began with the word “breasts.”
Breasts, she said. The whole evening started when I was at the bar on the hotel patio. Alone, except for a couple at the far end. And I thought, Breasts come out in hot weather.
Andie and Clarissa had long ago gone upstairs, she went on. They’d stayed with me as long as they could. But when they began tracing their fingertips up and down each other’s arms, and a flush bloomed on Clarissa’s chest, I told them: Go. I’ll be fine.
Now I was alone at the bar but for the couple, the patient said. The woman was wearing a lime-green strapless, her bosoms pouring out of the top, and she was bending over in just the right way to show them off to her man—the way you’d offer a sippy cup to a baby.
I felt my own nipples tighten, I confess, the patient said. It was all I’d hoped for: breezy nights, silk dress against my almost naked body.
She giggled after she said this to her therapist.
I hope this is all right, she said.
(Of course! I thought.)
Of course, said the therapist.
Then, just as I was enjoying it, she went on, I saw the expression on the man’s face—his jaw was just askew, his eyes slanting down, not listening as the woman talked—and Charlotte’s ugly voice jumped into my head.
Leering jerk! Charlotte said.
I’m leering, too! I shot back at her in my mind. It was the old argument. The woman wants to show her breasts, I said. They’re sexual organs. And men are supposed to want to see them.
Leering jerks!
I had to shut her out of my head, the patient told the doctor. She somehow wanted to take all the weirdness out of sex. She couldn’t accept the part of it that was wild: where sex is animal.
The patient sighed.
Earlier in the evening, she continued, the bar had been filled to the edge of the pool. Men in expensive business suits, a few exquisitely dressed women. They were packed in so tightly that