When Joshua B. rang, less than a year after his psychoanalysis had ended, I felt uneasy. ‘Do you have any time this week?’ he asked.
He came by a few hours later. ‘New curtains,’ he said, looking around the room. Then he sat down. ‘I’m a dick, a complete dick,’ he told me. ‘I’m in a terrible situation, and I don’t know how to get myself out.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Oh, don’t worry – everything’s fine with Emma and the baby. They’re OK.’ He sipped water from a bottle he’d brought with him. ‘But I’ve been seeing this girl.’ He looked at me, trying to gauge my response. ‘Are you surprised?’
‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’
Joshua had been seeing a girl named Alison, a twenty-two-year-old escort he’d found over the Internet. For the last few months, he’d seen her several times a week; he phoned or texted her daily. He was trying to help her change her life. He’d bought her a laptop, and taken her clothes-shopping before a recent job interview.
‘Last week I tried to end it with her. Our deal was I’d help her, but only if she stopped working. Then I found out she hadn’t stopped. So I broke it off. But she called me the next day and told me that she missed me and she needed to see me. I caved. I’m not an idiot – I know that I’ll lose everything if I don’t stop. But I can’t.’
As he spoke, I considered his timing. He and his wife, Emma, had just had a baby boy. Had Joshua turned to a prostitute because he needed to separate love and sex? Was he trying to protect Emma from desires that he thought were dirty or wrong? I started to explain these thoughts to Joshua, but he cut me off. ‘No, Emma and I still have sex. I’ve never had sex with Alison.’
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘The first time I met Alison I went for sex. I paid her and then she told me that she’d double-booked – did I mind waiting round the corner at the cafe for an hour? I waited, thinking she’d never turn up, but she did.’ He told me that they talked for a long time, that she was great, remarkable really. She had offered to give him back his money but he told her to keep it. They met again the next day, and continued talking.
‘There’s no sex at all?’ I asked.
‘She kisses me when I turn up and when I leave. She’s very physical – touching me when she talks, sometimes we hold hands – but we haven’t had sex.’
‘But you pay her when you see her?’
‘I give her money, but I don’t pay her. I buy her things she needs, give her money for her mother, who’s ill – I’m trying to help her. For a while I thought I’d have sex with her if I didn’t have to pay for it, but now I feel that would be wrong too. My hope is she’ll leave prostitution, and I’ll have launched her into the world, and that she’ll love me for what I’ve done for her.’
Over the years, I’ve seen several male patients become obsessed with prostitutes. The pick-up, put-down nature of the experience – the avoidance of dependence and emotional intimacy – makes the sex feel safer. And of course prostitution is a monetary transaction, and this inspires fantasy. But for Joshua, Alison meant something else.
‘Listen to the words you’re using,’ I told him. ‘ “Launch her into the world”, “love you for what you’ve done for her.” You sound a little like a mother talking about a baby.’
Joshua took another sip of water. ‘So I’m doing all of this because I wish I was a mother too? I envy my wife?’
I didn’t answer. It might be true that he envied his wife, her relationship to their son; this would explain something of the nature of his relationship to Alison, particularly Joshua’s mothering and the absence of sex. And yet it also seemed possible that he was acting out of envy for his son. In trying to seduce Alison from prostitution he might be endeavouring to steal a woman away from men – as he felt his son had stolen his wife from him. ‘Have you gone to prostitutes before?’ I asked.
‘No, never,’ he said. He told me that he and Emma had been together for eight years and he’d never been unfaithful to her, until this. ‘Did I tell you she calls the baby by the nickname she used to call me?’
‘You’re telling me that you’ve always been faithful to Emma, but something’s changed. I think you’re betraying your wife because you feel betrayed.’
Joshua leaned forward. ‘Do you remember the holiday Emma and I took two years ago, during the summer break? We rented that great cottage by the sea for almost a whole month. No Internet or television. A guy in a van turned up twice a week with fresh fish. I cooked for us every night. Emma fell in love with the kids next door, and that was sort of it. She wanted kids, then we wanted kids – isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want?’
‘But perhaps when you agreed to having a baby, you didn’t know how it would make you feel.’
‘I didn’t know it would make me feel so lonely.’
Joshua was lonely. Perhaps more than that, he was jealous of the closeness his wife and son shared. Unable to imagine a way in, Joshua could not find his place as a father. He experienced this incapacity as his wife abandoning him. What he claimed brightly as an act of folly was really an act of revenge.