6

The responsible thing to do—he tells himself every day—would be to take a leave of absence.

Instead, Will has done the opposite. As if to foreclose opportunities for reflection, the danger of too much time spent exploring his own psyche, he’s expanded his caseload to make a total of nineteen weekly patients as well as one daily and five thrice-weekly analysands to whom he listens and comments. Comments appropriately, despite whatever alarming, inappropriate sexual scenario is unspooling in his head. Even comments wisely, if he is to believe one fervent letter of thanks.

Denial? Defiance? The exhausting prospect of having to refer all his patients to other therapists, either temporarily, meaning he could look forward to returning to all the compounded distrust and anger his abandonment inspired, or permanently, meaning he’d have to start over and build a new practice from scratch? No matter the reason—and perhaps it’s as simple as the inability to imagine himself not working—Will continues on as he has been. “To hell in a hand-basket” is the phrase that pops into his head, one of his mother’s tidy dismissals, an announcement that she’s “washing her hands” (there’s another) of whatever mess it is.

He knows its cause, or at least what he assumes has forced the development of his own lust into a drive he can no longer govern or contain, a drive that has pushed him beyond the boundary of what he used to recognize as himself. He can even guess, within a few days, the night of this catalyst’s arrival. Carole was sitting across from him at the dining room table, dinner long over, Samantha asleep, plates stacked in the sink. He was looking at the table’s surface, watching the arc of moisture left by the sponge as it evaporated, disappeared, looking at this rather than at his wife’s face when he asked her, “Are you tired?” Because it was at this moment that he decided it was time: a decent interval had passed. Or if not decent, then bearable. What exactly was the sexual etiquette of mourning? All he knew was he’d waited as long as he could, hating himself for the calculation and for possessing desire that was unkillable, and therefore indecent.

Hesitant, afraid of causing insult, he didn’t ask the literal question but couched it as one of their oblique invitations for intercourse, that is, Are you too tired?

Carole looked at him. “All right,” she said, taking no trouble to conceal that this would be what they call a mercy fuck, an indulgence of his need, a gift she could afford to give him.

No, not afford. Afford belonged to the past, before the accident, when minor questions seemed to have answers of consequence. What restaurant? Which movie? Shower or bath? A walk to the park? Window-shopping along the avenue? White wine? Red? That it had once been worth considering such choices seemed marvelous, a matter over which to marvel. “All right,” Carole said, and he guessed this was because it didn’t matter to her what they did or didn’t do. What could be given to her? What could be taken away? Nothing that would return them to the consideration of minutiae.

But they hadn’t made love since the morning before Luke drowned, and Will felt an awkward and uncomfortable something growing between them, a film of alienation that was almost tissuelike, thickening with every passing hour, acquiring that much more substance. Soon this membrane would be opaque; soon he wouldn’t be able to see beyond it to his wife on the other side. He went up the stairs behind her, eye level with the back of her tanned thighs, feeling his gratitude. She would open herself to him. He could follow his body and disappear into hers. For a little while he could.

Carole undressed. She flipped back the covers and lay down without turning off the light. “Did you want it on?” he asked, because she didn’t usually.

“If you do.” She turned onto her side to face the window, and Will couldn’t see her expression. He bent down to pull off his socks and got into bed carefully so that it didn’t jounce or creak, drew toward her to embrace her from behind. She turned onto her stomach.

“Do you want to do it that way?” he asked, after a silence.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to start the other way?”

“Not really.”

So he entered his wife from the back, which he liked—he liked it just as well as any other way, better sometimes—and when he asked, a few minutes later, “Do you want to turn over?” again Carole said she didn’t.

She was on her hands and her knees, and he bent over her damp back, reaching to touch her. But he’d barely brushed her pubic hair when she moved his hand. “No?” he said, and she shook her head. He stopped moving; immediately his erection started to ebb inside her.

“Well, will . . . will you do it?” he asked, and she touched herself with her own hand. Obediently, she worked her way toward orgasm.

Carole could deny it, but Will understood the meaning of her silent compliance. It was a judgment against him. Against any organism so primitive that it could take comfort in flesh, against a bereaved father who chose this brief oblivion, who allowed himself a comfort he didn’t deserve.

Except deserve was his language, not hers. So perhaps she was right: he was unfair, he projected his disgust onto her, he craved punishment as much as he did sex and cleverly manipulated her into a vessel for both. He’d scripted her as his monolithic mother, was that it? The great force who gave and who withheld, who soothed even as she condemned. And Carole was indulgent enough to act this out.

“Oh God, Will! Shut up! Won’t you please, please just stop?” she says when he drags her down after him into one of his psychoanalytic rabbit holes, refusing to plummet with him through his bottomless, convulsive guilt.

Whatever it means, it did begin that August evening, their new one-position sex life, unvarying to the point of ritual. Ritual and seemingly irrevocable, as conclusive as a burned bridge, Luke’s death the obvious divide. Did this have to be an issue? Did he have to make it into an issue? Were he to accept without deconstructing the shift, he might grow used to it, complacent even. Many husbands—he can think of several—would celebrate a wife who took care of her own pleasure and left him to concentrate on his. But increasingly, Will found this hard, very hard. And the fact that she still went down on him but wouldn’t let him touch her, neither with finger nor tongue— so that there could be no parity (not that anyone was measuring, except of course they were, people always did measure everything, especially love and acts of love)—and the disparity made it, well, it’s hard to say it made anything worse, in that whatever might include blow jobs can’t be worse, but it did make it more pointed: their having lost their balance.

That first night—a real first night in that losing Luke had changed them, not returning them to virginity but bringing them to a different state of clumsy self-consciousness and second-guessed gestures, of lacking the skills needed to make it turn out right, the fear of wounding or offending or simply asking too much of the flesh: What could it do? How far away could it take them? How much comfort could it hold?—after Will came, he rested his forehead on her back for a moment. Then he pulled out from her, and she lowered herself silently onto the bed. Beside her, he felt his erection shrivel.

Now the heavier caseload is not only failing to dampen his obsessive fantasies, it may even be encouraging them. Too often Will comes home in the dark to dinner eaten in solitude, to sex without conversation—sex with a sleepy (sometimes almost sleeping) wife, followed by however many laps of CNN it takes to put him to bed. Addicted to its repetition of headlines and looping tape feed, the astigmatic crawl of reprocessed information at the bottom of the screen, he finds it almost reassuring that news desks recycle crimes and atrocities. Apparently there aren’t yet enough to fill twenty-four hours of broadcast.

For as far back as he can remember in his professional life, Will’s days had proceeded, one after another, like the pages of a book, a text he found readable, sometimes engrossing, above all comprehensible. It was a book he understood. Then, abruptly, this orderly narrative— his orderly narrative, the book of Will—gave way to a wild scribbling of urges.

No, that’s not true. It may seem he’s come apart all at once, but it’s an alignment—a compounding—of fractures, none of them new: estrangement from brother; death of son; reinvention of father. All versions of himself, if he can get away with such a Will-centered universe. Well, yes, of course he can. Inside his own head, he can. And why stop there? Why, when father, twin, and son cover all the tenses—past, present, and future? No wonder he was so . . . so whatever he was at the reunion. He’s ceased to exist as an extension of himself.

Fuck! Yes, he’s obsessed with sex. How else could he escape the inside of his head, where every thought refuses to be fleeting and instead waits its turn to be hyperarticulated, edited, revised, and then annotated like some nightmare hybrid of Talmudic commentary and Freudian case study? How else to jump out of his own skin except by fantasies of getting into someone else’s?

In the course of one session with the depressed forty-something accountant, the one with the shapeless khaki skirts, Will was transformed from attentive analyst into what his mother must have meant by sex maniac, a term he hasn’t heard her use for many years and one he used to find ridiculous, associating it with tabloid papers and true-crime magazines and foolish women who read about rape and secretly dream of it as overly zealous lovemaking. The accountant was sitting across from Will in the black leather chair that matched his couch when suddenly he was standing above her and she was on her knees begging to suck his cock. Not really, of course, and neither did they move on to frenzied, acrobatic-bordering-on-tantric sex.

Except that they did in his head. In his head they did.

He’s used to the more or less constant nano-porn that buzzes through his male brain without overcoming or even disrupting the sequence of his thoughts. This is a fact of his mental life. But the new preoccupation is something different, leaving him at the mercy of ultralustful thoughts featuring whoever sits in the chair opposite his, or, worse, lies on his couch so she can’t see that he is staring at her breasts. Objectively speaking, not one of the women he treats is as beautiful as his wife, not nearly. But whose fantasies are objective?

On his once rigorously exacting fuckability scale, on which even the iconic Pamela Anderson or J. Lo rated 9, every woman is now awarded 10 out of 10. Fat, thin, old, young, short, tall, dark, fair, flat, stacked: a perfect score depends on nothing more than being female.

The accountant, the grad student, even his training analysand. The menopausal one with too much money. The ASPCA officer, a typically misanthropic animal lover with white dog hair on her black sweaters. The archetypally unfulfilled tax lawyer who arrives for each session with a new missionary plan, off to Africa to adopt AIDS babies one week, bringing birth control to India the next. The lesbian who, having at last moved in with her partner, has decided she probably isn’t gay after all. The bride-to-be who has not told her betrothed that she is infertile because her fallopian tubes were badly scarred by pelvic inflammatory disease contracted while she worked her way through college as a stripper who sometimes traded sex for money. The buxom one, who in the old days would have rated a good 7.5, maybe 8, and who makes everything that much worse by letting her snug skirt ride up her thighs and asking outright, “I am attractive, aren’t I? I mean I do look good enough, don’t I? Be honest with me, please. I know you’re my therapist, Dr. Moreland, but as a man do you find me to be an attractive woman?” And all the rest of them.

They talk; he nods. He says “Oh,” says “Hmm,” says “Yes, I see what you mean,” says “Please, go on. I think we should pursue this,” and no matter who she is, no matter how inhibited or crazy or admittedly frigid, she’s instantly made over into a sexpot whose only purpose is to gratify his every lustful wish.

At work these fantasies remain upbeat, but when he revisits a scenario later, as he inevitably does in his chronic insomnia, they sour with an almost film-noir relish for bad endings, a narrative free fall he’s helpless to stop. It all comes apart in awful, bruising sex, intercourse that amounts to battery, struggles that arise out of the one irreversible law of Will’s fantasies: there can be no blind consummations. No closed eyes, no doing it in the dark, no front to back, no sixty-nine, no anything that would prevent eye contact: this is the rule, the one point on which he won’t—can’t—compromise and the one point she can’t—won’t—accept.

As the forbidden interaction with his patient devolves from consensual to coerced, what he sees in his head acquires an increasingly sordid cast, transformed from the cheery Kodachrome of Playboy centerfolds to the grainy, indistinct black and white of crimes unfolding on the monitor of a closed-circuit camera, acts recorded by a secret, peering eye. Hiked-up skirts and yanked-down panty hose, spread thighs, wet whites of eyes, undergarments strewn on the floor: sufficiently arousing that even after having had sex with his wife Will can flog himself on to a second and sometimes (well, once) a third ejaculation. No top-flight orgasm, that third; it left him feeling dizzy and ruined. But he’s forty-seven. Even hard-won prowess infuses him with something enough like optimism that he leaves his bed for a nearby armchair where he can move freely without disturbing his wife’s sleep.

Typically, by the time Will arrives at orgasm his imagined partner has suffered the opposite of synergy; she’s less than the sum of her parts, or fewer parts than would add up to a person: only lips, breasts, the downy cleft of her ass, the handful of flesh, so soft, inside the top of each thigh. It’s only afterward, when he’s spent and slumped in the chair, that both body and narrative reassemble. The same woman who began by begging for it reports Will’s misconduct to the authorities, not some panel of toothless Ph.D.’s whose idea of discipline is re-analysis with the agenda of shrinking his libido back to manageable proportions, but real authorities, whose power is violence. Nameless, faceless storm troopers deliver him to a barricaded compound far from home and family, a place from which he cannot be rescued. There he is blindfolded, beaten, and stripped of his license, his reputation, his savings—all that twenty years of hard work have afforded him. Bound and gagged, with no expectation of release, he’s left to bleed silently.

“Maybe,” Will says to Daniel, “maybe I’m having a midlife crisis. What do you think?”

Daniel raises his white eyebrows. “Facile. That’s what I think. Besides, didn’t you already have a midlife crisis?”

“Did I? I don’t think so.”

“I was remembering the thing with Carole’s sister.”

“That wasn’t a thing. And it wasn’t with. It was an infatuation. Not consummated. Hardly a crisis. As I remember, I was so unnerved by my being attracted to Rachel that I ignored her to the point that she told Carole she thought I didn’t like her. I had to work pretty hard to undo the damage I’d done.”

Daniel picks up a heavy Mont Blanc pen from his desk, balancing it upright on the blotter between his thumb and index finger and sliding them all the way down the barrel until the pen falls, its end still caught between thumb and finger. He repeats the motion, over and over, and Will watches the way each time the pen falls, it hits the blotter with a little bounce.

“Will,” Daniel says, “where did you go?”

“I don’t know. Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“I guess I was trying to characterize for myself the emotions that go with the fantasies. What I feel. Or what I feel apart from lust.”

“And?”

“Well, fear at the idea of being found out, caught in the act. And anger. Angry at myself for being so foolish. For risking so much to satisfy lust. But that anger is rational, after the fact. There’s a more basic rage I can’t get a handle on. Where does it come from? The lust itself is an angry lust, you know? Passion without tenderness. These are the nighttime scenarios I’m talking about. The fantasies during the day—the ones that distract me during a session with a patient— they’re pretty uninteresting. Like Penthouse ‘Forum’ letters. Wishful, silly. But the nighttime stuff, it taps into this anguished rage I can’t unpack.

“I mean, it’s easy enough to admit that I’m angry with Carole about her having restricted our sex life. All those rules that kicked in after . . . after Luke.” Will clears his throat, trying to prevent emotion from making his voice crack. “I think of it as her not allowing me to have sex with Luke’s mother. Which I understand. I mean I’m not unaware of how profoundly everything is affected by a loss this . . . this big.”

“Is that her explanation or yours?” Daniel asks, having waited for Will to compose himself.

“Mine. My explanation. Carole won’t talk about it. If I bring any of this up, she accuses me of trying to turn her into one of my patients.”

“Is she talking to anyone?”

“A therapist, you mean? No, no. She doesn’t believe in it, not for herself. She believes in yoga. Yoga classes. Yoga books.” Will sits forward in his chair. “Actually, we joke about it, but what Carole reads about isn’t yoga. She’d say I was imposing meaning on what has no real significance, but she’s addicted to this true-crime stuff—sinister, violent. Lust murders. Women savaged by misogynistic psychopaths. The kind of guys—you know the profile—whose mothers were prostitutes, or their sadistic fathers beat them, or there’s a frontal-lobe injury or an organic brain disorder, or maybe it’s idiopathic and they’re just evil. Richard Speck. Ted Bundy. Sex and violence inextricably bound up. And the stories have to be true. He can’t be a fictional monster. She couldn’t care less about Hannibal Lecter.

“I get there’s a fascination in being witness to a crime. I mean, probably the interest in most movies, novels, biographies—any narrative—depends on voyeurism, but this seems, well, maybe self-loathing is too strong a word. But suspect anyway. Driven by unconscious need. Otherwise why read one after another book about women getting raped and stabbed? Dismembered.” Will shakes his head. “I think she herself worries they represent a perverse impulse, because she hides them. Even has one of those weird little fabric book-cover things so she can read them unnoticed in a waiting room or in front of Samantha. But she won’t admit any contradiction in being a . . . a feminist and a yoga devotee and a purchaser of only organic produce, member of the food co-op, NYPIRG, Amnesty International, et cetera, as well as an insatiable consumer of true crime. With photo inserts of chopped-up women. And yes, I do realize that I’ve switched the focus from me to someone else.”

“How is it,” Daniel asks, “that Carole has figured out a way to refuse you sex with Luke’s mother, as you say? In that Luke’s mother is your wife.”

“By arranging things so that I can get off with a female body, her body, but one she won’t give a face. For three years now I’ve had to approach her from the back. She won’t . . .”

“Won’t what?” Daniel asks when Will doesn’t finish the thought.

“She won’t let me have missionary sex with her. Won’t tolerate any position that might risk eye contact. Won’t let me perform oral sex. Or touch her with my hand. She has orgasms, but I’m not allowed to give them to her. It’s like I’m some guy who happens to be attached to the dildo she’s using.”

Daniel looks at Will closely. He’s leaning forward over his desk, resting his chin on one hand. “You are angry,” he says.

“Yes. Yes, I’ve said I am. But I keep feeling there’s a piece missing from the explanations I’ve come up with. That it’s too easy to assign blame to Luke’s death. To call it a catalyst for every problem that develops between us.”

“Still, you do find a connection between the violent fantasies about your patients and Carole’s controlling your sex life? Limiting your access to her body?”

“Absolutely.” Will frowns. “At least I think I do. Now, having mentioned her reading about serial killers immediately after talking about my violent sexual fantasies, I’m wondering if it’s . . . if that’s entirely coincidental. I guess it is—what connection could there be?— but then I worry that my tendency to insist upon connections leads me to find significance where there isn’t any. Create meanings that don’t exist outside of my consciousness. You know, the whole God thing.”

“The God thing?”

“Yes, yes. The trap I fall into. Looking everywhere for significance. It gets out of my ability to control or direct it, won’t remain within the boundary of my work, within my patient relationships. Suddenly, significance becomes signs. And there I am, back to obsessing over the possibility of God. Whether God exists or is merely projection. Whether the significance I find or the signs I see represent nothing more than my wish for meaning, or have a validity beyond my desires and my consciousness.”

“Will,” Daniel says. “Here’s a place where I’m afraid I have to be textbook. Call attention to what you already know.”

“Wait, wait.” Will holds up his hand, laughing. Almost laughing. Every time he does laugh in Daniel’s company he’s aware, as he didn’t use to be, of how similar it feels to crying. The rhythm of it, the way it tightens in his chest, stretches his face. “I heard it, too. I know what you’re going to say.”

“Tell me.”

“My use of the word obsessing to characterize my thinking about God.” Daniel nods. “I know, I know.” Will’s voice assumes the bored tone of rote repetition, with a little twist, a lilt, of self-parody. “What is it I’m trying so hard not to perceive? What is it that my obsession defends me against?”

“Exactly.” Daniel replaces his pen in the leather tray next to his pipe stand. Though it’s been many years since he’s smoked, he keeps his pipes on his desk. Sometimes, while Will talks, he takes one and fiddles with it, using a handkerchief to polish its bowl, or holding it, empty, between his teeth, and Will knows these aren’t the idle acts they seem but a conscious attempt to disarm him, to suggest the older man isn’t listening as closely as he is.

“Remember when I asked if you considered psychoanalysis a type of conversion experience?” Will says.

“Remind me.”

“It was a long time ago, years ago. I’d reached a moment of exultation, very excited about what we were doing because suddenly everything was illuminated. Flooded with light. I couldn’t separate my . . . well, it was a form of ecstasy, and I didn’t separate it from what would be described as a religious experience, scales dropping from before my eyes, however you want to describe it. And I asked didn’t you think psychoanalysis was a religion as much as a science? It was a faith, Freud was a prophet, training analysis the conversion experience—a dramatic, road-to-Damascus-caliber revelation.”

“What was my answer?” Daniel says.

“I don’t know. I was so delighted with the question—really an observation couched as a question—that if you disagreed with me, I doubt I’d have heard you.”

Will and Daniel stand, Will noting, not for the first time, that he and Daniel wear almost identical glasses, rimless bifocals with pewter-colored stems. Daniel fastens the middle button of his suit jacket. He holds his hand out to take Will’s. “Next week?”

“Next week,” Will agrees, comforted by the promise of speaking with Daniel again soon, even though these sessions don’t seem to be helping. At least not with respect to the forbidden fantasies—the fantasies Will wants to forbid. They haven’t lessened the frequency or the virulence of his lust attacks at all.

Increasingly, Will worries he’ll succumb to what he’d reassure a patient was an innocuous normal outlet, and not the symptom of some monstrous psychopathology. He’d remind the hypothetical patient that even the most civilized gentlemen have their brutal fantasies. Especially the most civilized.

But Will isn’t his own patient. He isn’t hypothetical. What he is, is afraid. He doesn’t feel he knows himself anymore, and it seems only a matter of time before he’s no longer daydreaming but acting. Before he becomes the very thing he fears: a portion of unhappiness and ill fortune for the people he loves, the family he wants, brick by brick, to protect.