|
No one could have warned anyone more or made more clear what couldn't happen in the traumatic aftermath of the rape in the stairwell of her walk-up. With more shrinks than trees in The Naked City she chose to train each week to Philly to see Willem. And demanded I accompany her or "end it now." I thought we'd entered the wrong office. The waiting room overflowed with other young long-haired types who lived in denim. All the women abjured bras; (several were breast-feeding). Welcome to the domain of Dr. Willem Keen. A small fleshy dude who wore a lime-colored tee shirt and brown, baggy gabardines. Which was the source of some shock since the classic psychoanalyst is born wearing muted suits and ties, mysterious weaves of gray and brown. And yet it didn't take forever to figure out that the absence of air- conditioning was a choice, as was the light-cotton shift Laura had worn. There was a sofa and may have been a chair but I remember the scatter of cushions— the delectable option of being horizontal. Like a lot of people who affect a casual air, he went straight to the point. "The rape brought out earlier traumas which I have begun, after many detours, to unearth." Skip the archaeological metaphors, I thought. "You know about her father. And how he took giving his daughter baths a little too far." "But Laura said she'd worked through..." "She was almost there. The rape was an immeasurable setback. For now. And for the next few years she's an emotional vegetable." "How can say that...as if she weren't human." I gave my spiel about how I was willing to wait for her to recover. "She's frozen." I gave him my best highly skeptical look. "There's no reason why you should understand." Laura squeezed my hand. Whispered in my ear. Sultry voiced in the sultriness. That she "liked me." Then (more audibly): "Please. Listen to Willem." This was a doc you called by his first name. "But I like Laura." "I like her too. But there is no Laura." Our arms around each other now as we huddled close, like teens in an asylum movie. "You're looking for intimacy...don't be ashamed! Get it from another woman." How could he have guessed so fast that I was mortally tired of inaptly named "relationships"built around sex, and that I was in the grip of something I found bizarrely alluring in the case of Laura...? Laura; like melted wax. Her dress rolled-up now to hip level. "Once we defuse these...bombs in her system she may come back to life, burst free of the pod..., but it will take...years." He sensed I was bursting to interrupt: "I'm giving it to you straight." Reclining in the moist oppressive heat she and I found murderous he gave a charge to every word. "The woman you see hear smell and touch... Her skin is warm and smooth, her copper hair is luminous in the summer sun, her cunt is wet—and that's the most deceptive— because inside, inside her insides she feels nothing; she's..." (reaches across the room to squeeze her wrist) "NUMB" "But if she's frigid how come she's so open when we do do it. There was a girl I knew in Colorado. I couldn't get her to open. And she lay there with her thighs shut and a terrified expression and I could see there was a problem." "And you let go.""Yeah, because I wasn't all that drawn to her and that look combined with the way she pressed her thighs together while lying there naked on the bed in that sanguine light, made persistence seem absurd." "But you were angry.""No, frustrated. I also had the misfortune of knowing her father (who gloated when he whipped me at tennis after I told him I never played) and figured her misery was rooted in his shitheadedness. And we'd both be gone from town before the end of summer." "But nothing Laura or I can say can make you see that this situation is the same in a different form." "No, in the other case a more gentle and patient & approach &might have been the key & it pains me to say &and I want Laura." "There is that difference. They're pounding on my door—session's over. I think we—I mean the three of us—should meet again." And he was gone. And she and I were never closer than in the silence we dwelled in on the ride home. |
||||
|
|
||||
