The morning after our first sexual encounter I told Dr. Joan I hoped it was the beginning of an exclusive romantic relationship that would bring both of us some happiness, and she came back with a stern lecture. Such a statement, she said, sounds too much like a "pronouncement" and such pronouncements always trigger in her the wrong kind of attitude, which of course takes her out of the moment.
She explained she needs to explore. Which is to say that she does indeed desire a best friend and lover, but that at this early stage she can't be sure I am that person. I might be, but then tomorrow she could meet a man named Tom, and he might turn out to be the man actually destined to play that role in her life.
If she were to honor my desire for some sort of contract or commitment, well, she would quickly become overly critical of the relationship, testing it constantly to see if indeed she had chosen correctly. And she doesn't want to do that. Even though she fully understands my fears about being hurt again, as Elizabeth did when she announced--out of the blue--that it was time for me to leave.
"The reality," Dr. Joan intoned, "is that no guarantees can ever be made in life. Having said all of that, however, by definition we are lovers."
Ah-ha! I thought. The Ice Queen finally makes a concession!
"Also," she said, "I'm not involved with any other man. And I'd like to continue to explore...to learn more about who you are."
I brought up her tendency to be distant, and I said I imagined that a guy like, say, Cary Grant would breeze into the house and with his enormous grace and charm just brush her distancing aside with a witty comment. Dr. Joan smiled, and nodded. Yes. That would work beautifully. Also what would work would be for me to gently bite her hand, as she had invited me to do in an earlier encounter. "Now that always has a powerful erotic effect on me," she said.
At dinner at The Ritz-Carolton that evening she continued to probe me about my history, my tastes in music and art. Thus encouraged I launched into my private theory about music and its autobiographical aspects, especially Beethoven's. Also there are devices in music that parallel those in fiction. An accented dissonance and its immediate resolution, for instance, is a good metaphor for a promise made and a promise kept.
Even though she studied music for many years and played cello in an amateur chamber group, she said she couldn't relate to these rather strange theories of mine, and she said it in a way that was more than a simple observation. But I didn't care what she thought about them.
I asked her about her psychotherapy practice. She said most of her wealthy clients presented with sexual identity issues, prescription drug habits, mid-life crises, fragile self-esteem and a whole array of run-of-the-mill upper-class neuroses. After a while it gets predictable and boring, but then these people DO need help and do not object in the slightest to her $200 per hour fee.
To relieve the boredom of private practice she does psychological consultation work for a school district in a town north of Philadelphia. Allentown. "Have you ever heard of it?"
"Yes," I said. "Billy Joel sang a song about the place, didn't he?"
She frowned. "Billy Joel? No, I'm not familiar with the song." Anyway, she said she was working with an absolutely brilliant and fascinating and powerful and highly educated and dynamic and intriguing man, a great and true friend, who is a broadly experienced maverick, a cowboy in spirit, appearance and manner, who has an abundance of energy and vitality and dynamism and charisma and a most penetrating analytical intelligence, who organizes hundreds and hundreds of consulting workshops like this and, well, to tell you the truth she always feels inadequate in the face of his rapid-fire questioning and his lofty, almost-impossible-to-meet expectations.
Todd. His name is Todd. As it happens she has a photo in her purse, which just came in the mail from him. Here, look. This was taken up in the Canadian wilderness, during one of our outward-bound-type vision quests.
"You mean like w hat the Native Americans practiced?"
"Exactly. And he put me through two solid weeks of fasting, sweat lodges, and solitary overnighters on the top of a remote mountain. It was an absolutely incredible experience."
She explained that in the middle of it, when she was terrified of the awful things--about her father of course--that welled up out of her dark psyche, Todd gave her a pipe. A magic pipe. And with this generous act, she said, this beautiful man made possible one of the most profound spiritual experiences that she's ever had.
I looked at the photo. It showed her in the woods near a blazing campfire, a tall white haired, white bearded blue-eyed man with his massive arm around her shoulder like a father, smiling. Positively brilliant Todd.
She rattled on about these consulting sessions in Allentown. "Todd guides me as I formulate policies and construct models for training high school principals, who in turn train their teachers in didactic methods based on Native American spiritual concepts."
This requires lots and lots of verrrrry intense workshops and seminars, she said, during which these policies and plans are articulated, under the overall guidance of deeply insightful Todd, that incredibly talented and powerful and bright man who--surprisingly--has enormous confidence in her analytic and organizational skills, and most particularly her broad clinical expertise and ability to handle the experiential side of the thing, a perfect complement to the leadership that Todd brings to the whole enterprise. And these eager school administrators are happy to pay for it. Fifteen hundred dollars an hour. Yes, and they think it's a bargain.
Why, just a month ago Joan and Todd were up at the Allentown Hilton, and at five A.M., before it's even light outside, he summons her to his room and he fixes her with his intense blue-eyed gaze and snap his fingers, and speaks in a staccato: Here are the problems, a, b, c, d. So what is your framework? What is your structure? What are your postulated solutions? Where are your methodologies? What are their components, what are their elements?"
Snap, snap, snap, SNAP!
And Dr. Joan at five A.M. blinks and feels girlishly inadequate and incompetent yet hangs in there and somehow produces exactly what Todd wants from her, and Todd smiles with pleasure at a job well done.
"So what did the pipe look like?" I asked.
Dr. Joan was silent for a long time. "Well, I don't remember exactly how it looked."
"Well, how big was it?"
She held her hands apart, about 18 inches. "About that big."
"What was the bowl made of?"
"I don't know. Maybe wood."
"Were there feathers attached?"
She shook her head. "It sounds odd, not remembering the details, since it was such an important experience."
I said I was questioning her so closely because I wanted to make her another gift. Say, a beautiful framed platinum print of a photo of a similar pipe, with perhaps a handwritten exposition on its symbolic meaning based on the materials I'll get when I do some research on Native American religions.
* * *
After dinner, we both ordered coffee and moist chocolate cake with thick chocolate icing and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side. Why do I crave sweets so much lately? I suppose indulging myself, saturating my bloodstream with sugar, is another form of hiding, or defending. Who knows? She's the shrink, but I don't think I'll ask her about it.
Instead I said: "I understand that for you making romantic plans seems too much like asking for a commitment, but how about dinner next Saturday?"
She laughed.
"What?" I said.
"My God, you are even more of a process junkie than I am!"
"Apparently so."
"Saturday will be fine, and you're welcomed to come home with me tonight. But you must remember: I am not Elizabeth."
"Does speaking of her bother you?"
"Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't."
* * *
Early the next morning, she explained that very recently she promised herself this time around she would do everything differently, because the way she used to do things--either pursuing someone or being the object of pursuit--never worked. It's time for a major change, she said. And I presumed our present quiet conversation, with bright sunlight illuminating the white cotton curtain across the room, was evidence of that change.
I asked her what time she wanted me out of there, since she had patients coming later that morning. She said around eight thirty. At eight fifteen I was about to get dressed, but she reached up and ran her hand softly over my flat belly. She caressed me until my magnificent cock, as she called it, rose and became fully erect. I kept my eyes shut, enjoyed her touching, fondling.
"I'm getting you all excited right before I ask you to leave."
"Indeed you are," I said.
"But I'm really not much into morning sex," she said, releasing me. She walked over to her closet, inspected the array of dark-colored clothing.
"Oh?"
"This is merely the expression of a personal preference, you know. Absolutely not a judgment," Dr. Cock-teaser said.
