Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (2 page)

“
Ohhhhhh
oui…ouiiiiii”

I would have been very
happy to go back to sleep but now I was owed an orgasm. Declining
her offer would be regarded as a callous misstep and would require
a more carefully worded explanation than I was capable of
delivering at four in the morning. It would be wiser to accept her
manual advances. She had become very skilled in this department so
I knew it wouldn’t take long and I’d make sure my gratitude was
audible. The next day I was due to become a certified New Yorker.
Not because my green card was about to come through, God forbid
that should ever materialise, but because on Yvette’s insistence, I
would start seeing a therapist.

Dr Susie Fisher

I told myself that I’d be
more open with a woman but the real reason I chose her had more to
do with the fact that I could fantasise about fucking her. I
already had a story in mind that would, I felt, set the tone for
our sessions. It was a story that touched on many of the areas I
felt were pertinent to my case and it would give her succinct
overview of where I was coming from. A girlfriend invites her man
to share his deepest darkest fantasies. He is reluctant at first
since deep dark fantasies are often best kept that way, but his
girlfriend, intent on getting to know him better, assures him that
no matter what he says she won’t be shocked because after all it’s
just a fantasy. Falteringly he begins tell her about how he’d like
to be gang-raped. By Japanese schoolgirls. Wearing
strap-ons.

She nods
understandingly.

“
Now you,
what’s your fantasy?”

It’s her turn to be
reluctant.

“
No. It’s too
out there.”

“
Come on, I
told you mine”

“
Ok, to get
married and have kids”

Yvette was simply not
willing to continue seeing me until I dealt with my intimacy
issues. Fearing an impending sexual embargo I agreed. I wouldn’t
have even entertained such pusswhippery if she wasn’t so sexually
adept and in certain lights and on certain days and in her own way,
quite beautiful in a non-conventional sort of way.

When she turned up looking
terrible I’d feel a jolt of shame as if somehow it was my fault and
carefully disguise the emerging grimace under a smile. And on the
rare occasion she arrived looking carefree and beautiful like a
happy pretty sixteen year-old I’d stifle my glee. The idea being,
that either way I was expressionless.

Yes, I was looking forward
to therapy.

Dr Susie looked directly
at my crotch and played with her hair as I talked. She was tall and
thin and big-titted and always wore sensible grey skirts and
jackets with shiny broaches and sometimes blindingly white blouses
over those lovely bulging…oh to do her. The knowledge that
everything would need to take place within the allotted hour only
heightened my fervour.

“
So, how was
your week?” she’d say

“
Fuck my
week,” I’d say

“
Fuck
me
weak” she’d say

I’d fold her over that big
beige armchair and talk about my fantasies of fucking her
while
I fucked her. That would be worth three hundred and
fifty dollars a week at eight pm every Wednesday and she wouldn’t
have to worry about cancellations. But as she creased her smooth
buttery forehead in my honour I could sense her willingness not
just to witness my pain but to inhabit it. Between imaginary bouts
of being butt-fucked, cock-spanked and ass-tongued she somehow
managed to point out links I hadn’t realised were there. For
instance it was natural she said, that having used a safety pin to
prevent Father Eddy from fondling my pre-adolescent balls, I should
seek out similar solutions with anyone else who tried to
get
in
.

Maybe my desire to
butt-fuck, cock-spank and ass-tongue was an example of this.
Perceiving her thus would keep even my therapist at bay. Why was I
so distant? She asked me to bring in the recently written ending to
what I kept referring to as
my book.
I couldn’t see how any
of it related to our therapy sessions but because I hadn’t shown it
to anyone else I thought I might as well get some feedback since
she was already on my payroll and so in our next session after
reading the last thirty pages of what would eventually become the
ending of Diary Of An Oxygen Thief my therapist confidently
proclaimed I was suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder.

At least she didn’t say it
was badly written.

Yvette opened the door to
her apartment before I got the key in it.

”
I look like
shit” she said

The idea being, that
because she knew she looked like shit she was relieved of any
responsibility for it. If anything it became my problem since I was
now expected to make her feel better about it. Whenever she kissed
me her hand would automatically stray to my dick to monitor my
affection for her. She hated when I got hard without her knowledge.
And that night for some reason maybe because I’d spent the previous
hour being investigated or perhaps it was because she did indeed
look like shit there was nothing stirring.

“
You’re not
affectionate.”

"It’s because your stomach
is hurting. I didn’t want to…"

“
You’re
distant.”

It was a question of
theft. There was no hard-on where a hard-on should be. Ordinarily
it wouldn’t have been a problem. If anything, I was just as
surprised as she was. The long silence that followed, was
punctuated by the sighs of a martyr and the whipping back and forth
of glossy magazine pages until at last she slipped wordlessly away
to bed. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and made for the
couch.

The next morning I was
woken by the sound of spigots being turned on and off until finally
she appeared in the living room in her uptight formal bank attire
looking pinched-face, unfucked and even uglier than the night
before.

Pausing at the door she
turned to look at me on the couch

"You can go back to bed
now”

I was lying on a
smouldering hard-on.

*****

Paedophile priests,
punishment-beatings, mental and physical abuse, domestic violence,
two near-drownings and the recurring nightmares of the little boy I
saw mangled in a farm accident.

“
You had a
brutal childhood.”

Dr Susie looked directly
into my eyes making sure I heard her. There, it was official. But
none of it felt like it had happened to me. I was detached from
these events. Had she confused my case with someone else? Maybe she
was exaggerating my trauma so I‘d keep coming every week. I was
after all, her misery-mortgage. And yet I began to enjoy our
sessions mostly because it was becoming clear I wouldn’t be
expected to marry Yvette. That I wasn’t so much in love with her,
as terrified of letting her down. I was about to marry her out of
politeness. Why do that to myself? Or to her? She had her own
agenda and her own time-frame. At thirty- three her body-clock was
sounding the alarm. I told Dr Susie about an unusually calm stretch
of water on the Niagra River called The Deadline. Once passed there
was no way to avoid the pull of the falls three miles ahead.
Without looking up from her lap Dr Susie asked a seemingly
unrelated question.

“
Have you
ever tried online dating?”

*****

Yvette’s recently becalmed
hell-raising father, was separated but not yet divorced from her
artist-mother who for some reason, liked to argue in airports. Her
ridiculously handsome brother was a geologist and in a way, so was
her privately-educated sister, being as she was, a professional
gold-digger. The grandfather on her mother’s side made a fortune
producing champagne bottles and lived in a small compact stone
edifice that could without irony be referred to as a castle. The
other grandfather was a retired admiral in the French Navy with a
Parisian street named after him; Rue Du Admiral Gumont- Sutre. He
owned a summer-house in Belle Ille where they holidayed at the
slightest provocation. Yvette had been abandoned in her fair share
of airports and when she wasn’t waiting in the lost and found she
was watching Papa chase Maman around their antique-laden Parisian
home with a kitchen knife.

Her therapist forbade her
from telling me too much about her upbringing presumably because
she thought I‘d be shocked but she couldn’t know that having
experienced certain childhood eccentricities of my own these
nursery tales had a certain soothing effect on me. Anyway, by the
time I was formally introduced to
Maman
I was very
well-disposed towards the mass of neuroses, complexes, impulses and
moods that stood now collectively before me.

“
Bonjour I’m
Veronique. It’s so nice to meet you”

With her aquiline profile,
long dark hair and red leathery skin she looked more like a
Cherokee Warrior than the mother of a systems analyst from the Bank
of Paris. I had already heard about the legendary debates with
airport staff, the aborted attempts to liberate cute little pigs
from zoo enclosures and the commandeering of microphones from
singers considered unworthy of the title. She bent almost in half
to kiss me.

Veronique was an artist. A
pretty good one actually. If I hadn’t been so consistently afraid
of being fired I might have even bought one of her paintings which
to my eye, were heavily influenced by Henri Rousseau. I didn’t dare
tell her that though. We were
en route
,
en famille
to
the Metropolitan Museum Of Art to see an exhibition of paintings by
Gauguin, because logically enough, he was one of Veronique’s
favorite painters.

Yvette, though nervous
about this meeting was pleased it was happening. She had wanted us
to meet at Thanksgiving but this idea had proved too much for me
loaded as it was with so much significance. I knew that meeting the
parents, or even one of them, at Thanksgiving was tantamount to a
marriage proposal. Even if the celebrants were French and Irish
there was still an unspoken implication that I was agreeing to
something other than just a plate of turkey. But I was ok with
Primitivism.

In fact Gauguin was a hero
of mine too, since he’d given up his job as a bank clerk to shag
French Polynesian girls. Confronted suddenly by an almost
life-sized sepia photo of the artist’s tight-faced wife and
children I felt like I myself had just arrived home late and what
time did I call this and who were these two women I’d brought home
with me?

“
Can’t blame
him for leaving.” I said, and immediately regretted it. It was
exactly the wrong thing to say, touching as it, did on Yvette’s
sensitivity about being abandoned. I braced myself for the public
humiliation that would surely follow. I myself was about to become
an exhibit.

“
Ahh she is
so afraid of being abandoned, no?” said Veronique bending even
deeper now to kiss her daughter. Yvette’s cheeks beamed
embarrassment outward into the exhibition space and I suddenly
realized Maman was Papa too. She had to be, because Papa had fucked
off. But Gauguin had fucked off and they called him a genius. He
can’t have been the most considerate of men to dump his wife and
kids and take off with Van Gogh, that other famous family man. But
the Swedish wife took the children to live with her wealthy parents
so there was no need to dwell on them too much and they did look
pretty fucking boring compared to the technicolor windows into
paradise on the walls ahead. I refused to believe that he wasn’t
fucking every little Polynesian trollop he could get his hands on.
Painting all day between orgasms and shagging all night between
paintings. Art historians count him amongst the most notable
Post-Impressionists but to me his most significant achievement was
that he lived in an aftershave commercial before aftershave
existed.

“
You have
found she can be difficult, no?”

We were on the roof patio
of the Met Museum and Veronique was talking about her daughter as
if she wasn’t standing next to her. I mimicked a man testing the
ground with his foot and then leaned back in mock-horror as an
imaginary explosion leapt from the tiled surface of the roof
garden. Veronique smiling eyes met mine and we turned to enjoy
Yvette’s confusion. The moment felt good and strangely just. This
was my cue to produce the glossy book of Gauguin prints from my
shoulder bag and hand it to Veronique.

“
Pour toi
Maman.”

I had been forewarned that
she loathed people who tried to speak French to her but I had spent
a hundred and eighty dollars on the book so I wanted my money’s
worth.

Inhaling loudly and
ooh-la-la-la’ing she bowed to kiss both my cheeks again. Real
full-on wet kisses not make-up-saving facsimiles.

She wiped my face like I
was a rascal and stepped back to regard me. Later, back in her
apartment Yvette put away her phone after a long muffled
conversation in high speed French. The verdict was in.

“
Maman says
she thought you loved me passionately and that it was clear to her
we would be married. She also said that she herself liked you very
much and that you were of superior intelligence.”

But then she went on to
say that her mother’s boyfriend was using the fact that she was too
old to have children as an excuse to end their relationship. He was
thirty-nine (same age as me) and she was forty-nine. Mother and
daughter now shared the same fear of abandonment. Yvette was
worried that Maman was on the prowl. It was true she flirted with
me but I just assumed this was what French mothers did. She said I
would look great in an ornate suit of armor that had been
commissioned by the wife of an Austrian count. The sexual
possibilities of being the filling in a mother and daughter
sandwich were not lost on me but I couldn’t suppress the thought
that her clit was at least as big as my dick.