pieces. [Long pause.]
‘I spent the weekend with Curt Rollins. For your info, he’s just published a novel that the Partisan Review calls – and I quote – “as stunningly poetic a piece of fiction as has appeared in years.” Unquote. [Pause] He’s got talent. His prose is like lightning: cutting, darting, brilliant; he’s a Joyce with the energy of Henry Miller. [Pause] He’s working on a new novel about fifteen minutes in the life of a young boy who’s just lost his father. Fifteen minutes – a whole novel. Curt’s cute, too. Most girls throw themselves at him. [Pause] He needs money. [Pause] It’s funny, he doesn’t seem to like sex much. Wham-bam, back to the old writing board. Wham-bam. [Pause] He liked the way I sucked him off though. But …
‘I’d like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don’t think it would bother him much. I think he’d consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] “Stunning novel” – Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that’s teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. “Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?” [Pause] He’s another ball-less masturbator. [Pause]
‘You sure are quiet today. Can’t you even throw in a few uh-huhs or yesses? I’m paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.’
‘I don’t feel like it today.’
‘You don’t feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on, Dr Rhinehart, you’ve gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste. Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let’s hear that faithful echo.’
‘Today I’d like to hear what you’d like to do if you could recreate the world to suit your own … highest dreams.’
‘Cut the crap. I’d turn it into a great big testicle, what else?’
[Pause] [Longer pause]
‘I’d … I’d eliminate all the human beings first … except … eh … maybe for a few. I’d destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I’d put – all the animals would still be there – No. No, they wouldn’t. I’d eliminate all of them too. There’d be grass though, and flowers. [Pause]
‘I can’t picture the humans. [Pause] I can’t even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of an empty world. Boy, that’s something. The little lays at Remo’s would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They’re gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.’
‘Can you imagine a human being that you would like?’
‘Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I’m in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I’ve got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phoney. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Your phoney code of ethics. You hide behind it. I’ve sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I’ve twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don’t know what I’m doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I’d like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, “You say you’d like to feel my prick,” and I’ll say, “Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father …” and you’ll say, “You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back … ” and we’ll both go right on acting as if the words didn’t count.’
Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.
‘I don’t blame you. I’ve been acting like an automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.’
Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned from the waist to stare at me.
‘What did you say?’
‘You feel you don’t know what I said?’ But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.
‘Holy shit, there’s a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I’ve never heard you say anything before.’
‘Well, Linda, I’d say it was time to end non-directive therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?’
‘That’s what I just said.’
‘First, I think we’d better acknowledge that you’re outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much less than many women, since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he’s got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly, that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breadth of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you’ve slept with and who’ve proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.’
Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished, her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.
‘Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concrete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are sounding off about me? You don’t know me at all. I haven’t told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.’
‘Do you want to show me your breasts?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?’
‘You can’t judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don’t forget it. They know they’ve had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you’ll hide behind your precious ethics and feel superior because all you see is the surface.’
‘What other good qualities do you have?’
‘I call a spade a spade. I know. I’m not perfect and I say so, and I’ve learned that you psychiatrists are priggish little voyeurs and I tell you, and that’s why you all end up attacking me. You can’t stand the truth.’
‘My ethics kept me from making love to you?’
‘Yes, unless you’re a fairy, like another headshrinker I knew.’
‘Let me then formally announce that in my future relations with you I will not seek to maintain the traditional patient-doctor relationship and I will not abide by the standard of ethics set down in the code of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. From now on I shall respond to you as human to human. As psychiatrist human I will advise you, but no more. How’s that?’
Linda shifted her feet to the floor and looked over at me with a slow smile, meant to suggest sexiness? She was, in fact, reasonably sexy. She was slender, clear-complexioned, full-lipped. As long as she had been my patient, however, I had not responded to her sexually one millimeter, or to any other female patient in five years, despite writhings, declarations, propositions, strippings and attempted rapes – all of which had occurred during one session