Envy (6 page)

Will looks at him. “Weird how as you get older you find yourself less and less certain of anything.”

“Just wait,” his father says. “You have no idea.”

“Mom believes in God, doesn't she?”

His father shakes his head. “That's a very private question,” he says. “I don't think I've ever asked her directly.”

“Carole does. Or maybe she doesn't. She seems at peace with life, with herself. Not like me. I think she might be what they used to call a secular humanist. Brimming over with unaccountable optimism. Even after Luke. Even now, when every day brings more evidence of how many messes we've made that we can't undo. Environmental damage. Terrorism.”

His father nods slowly. “Sometimes,” he says, as he steps onto the curb, “when I print a picture, I see that I've photographed what I didn't know was there. Whatever it is, it's something I looked at without seeing. So I'm surprised, I feel something's been given to me. But by whom? What?” He looks at Will. “There's a quote I came across. I can't get it out of my head. ‘The unconscious is “God's country.' ” He folds his arms over his chest, frowning. “That's the reason I've been reading up on it—Freud, Jung. What do you make of it?”

“What's the context?” Will asks. “Who said it?”

His father makes a swatting gesture. “I can't remember. What I want to know is, is it true? Do you, as a psychoanalyst, someone who's always mucking about in there, think it's true?”

Will frowns. “Well, the unconscious would be the place from which irrational fears and hopes, dreams—”

His father interrupts. “Whoever it was, that's not what they were talking about.”

“You didn't let me finish.”

“I know where you're going, and it's a little more mysterious than that.”

“No, you didn't let me finish.”

“All right. I'm listening.”

“Okay. This is the only way I can answer. I've thought about Luke's continued existence. I don't mean my wish that he live on, but the conflict—the discontinuity—between his presence within me and his absence in the world. I've ascribed that, that disparity to the unconscious. My unconscious. I know that Luke's . . .” Will stops, unable, for a moment, to speak. When he does, the first few words come out choked. “I know he's dead,” he says, reaching for his father's arm. “But only when I'm awake, conscious. In my unconscious, Luke lives. The realness of him in my dreams is, is so . . . I wake up, and the bed, the floor, my wife, my own hand—nothing has the . . . the reality, the incandescent life of the child in my dreams. My unconscious.

“So,” Will says, “maybe that's an example of the unconscious being God's country. A place of life after death. Of resurrection. Reunion with those who die before us.”

His father nods, looking up. “Heaven,” he says. “Just as it's always been promised.”

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.