Envy (7 page)

“Maybe,” Will says to Daniel, “maybe I'm having a midlife crisis. What do you think?”

Daniel raises his white eyebrows. “Facile. That's what I think. Besides, didn't you already have a midlife crisis?”

“Did I? I don't think so.”

“I was remembering the thing with Carole's sister.”

“That wasn't a
thing.
And it wasn't
with.
It was an infatuation. Not consummated. Hardly a crisis. As I remember, I was so unnerved by my being attracted to Rachel that I ignored her to the point that she told Carole she thought I didn't like her. I had to work pretty hard to undo the damage I'd done.”

Daniel picks up a heavy Mont Blanc pen from his desk, balancing it upright on the blotter between his thumb and index finger and sliding them all the way down the barrel until the pen falls, its end still caught between thumb and finger. He repeats the motion, over and over, and Will watches the way each time the pen falls, it hits the blotter with a little bounce.

“Will,” Daniel says, “where did you go?”

“I don't know. Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“I guess I was trying to characterize for myself the emotions that go with the fantasies. What I feel. Or what I feel apart from lust.”

“And?”

“Well, fear at the idea of being found out, caught in the act. And anger. Angry at myself for being so foolish. For risking so much to satisfy lust. But that anger is rational, after the fact. There's a more basic rage I can't get a handle on. Where does it come from? The lust itself is an angry lust, you know? Passion without tenderness. These are the nighttime scenarios I'm talking about. The fantasies during the day—the ones that distract me during a session with a patient— they're pretty uninteresting. Like
Penthouse
‘Forum' letters. Wishful, silly. But the nighttime stuff, it taps into this anguished rage I can't unpack.

“I mean, it's easy enough to admit that I'm angry with Carole about her having restricted our sex life. All those rules that kicked in after . . . after Luke.” Will clears his throat, trying to prevent emotion from making his voice crack. “I think of it as her not allowing me to have sex with Luke's mother. Which I understand. I mean I'm not unaware of how profoundly everything is affected by a loss this . . . this big.”

“Is that her explanation or yours?” Daniel asks, having waited for Will to compose himself.

“Mine. My explanation. Carole won't talk about it. If I bring any of this up, she accuses me of trying to turn her into one of my patients.”

“Is she talking to anyone?”

“A therapist, you mean? No, no. She doesn't believe in it, not for herself. She believes in yoga. Yoga classes. Yoga books.” Will sits forward in his chair. “Actually, we joke about it, but what Carole reads about isn't yoga. She'd say I was imposing meaning on what has no real significance, but she's addicted to this true-crime stuff—sinister, violent. Lust murders. Women savaged by misogynistic psychopaths. The kind of guys—you know the profile—whose mothers were prostitutes, or their sadistic fathers beat them, or there's a frontal-lobe injury or an organic brain disorder, or maybe it's idiopathic and they're just evil. Richard Speck. Ted Bundy. Sex and violence inextricably bound up. And the stories have to be true. He can't be a fictional monster. She couldn't care less about Hannibal Lecter.

“I get there's a fascination in being witness to a crime. I mean, probably the interest in most movies, novels, biographies—any narrative—depends on voyeurism, but this seems, well, maybe self-loathing is too strong a word. But suspect anyway. Driven by unconscious need. Otherwise why read one after another book about women getting raped and stabbed? Dismembered.” Will shakes his head. “I think she herself worries they represent a perverse impulse, because she hides them. Even has one of those weird little fabric book-cover things so she can read them unnoticed in a waiting room or in front of Samantha. But she won't admit any contradiction in being a . . . a feminist and a yoga devotee and a purchaser of only organic produce, member of the food co-op, NYPIRG, Amnesty International, et cetera, as well as an insatiable consumer of true crime. With photo inserts of chopped-up women. And yes, I do realize that I've switched the focus from me to someone else.”

“How is it,” Daniel asks, “that Carole has figured out a way to refuse you sex with Luke's mother, as you say? In that Luke's mother is your wife.”

“By arranging things so that I can get off with a female body, her body, but one she won't give a face. For three years now I've had to approach her from the back. She won't . . .”

“Won't what?” Daniel asks when Will doesn't finish the thought.

“She won't let me have missionary sex with her. Won't tolerate any position that might risk eye contact. Won't let me perform oral sex. Or touch her with my hand. She has orgasms, but I'm not allowed to give them to her. It's like I'm some guy who happens to be attached to the dildo she's using.”

Daniel looks at Will closely. He's leaning forward over his desk, resting his chin on one hand. “You are angry,” he says.

“Yes. Yes, I've said I am. But I keep feeling there's a piece missing from the explanations I've come up with. That it's too easy to assign blame to Luke's death. To call it a catalyst for every problem that develops between us.”

“Still, you do find a connection between the violent fantasies about your patients and Carole's controlling your sex life? Limiting your access to her body?”

“Absolutely.” Will frowns. “At least I think I do. Now, having mentioned her reading about serial killers immediately after talking about my violent sexual fantasies, I'm wondering if it's . . . if that's entirely coincidental. I guess it is—what connection could there be?— but then I worry that my tendency to insist upon connections leads me to find significance where there isn't any. Create meanings that don't exist outside of my consciousness. You know, the whole God thing.”

“The God thing?”

“Yes, yes. The trap I fall into. Looking everywhere for significance. It gets out of my ability to control or direct it, won't remain within the boundary of my work, within my patient relationships. Suddenly, significance becomes signs. And there I am, back to obsessing over the possibility of God. Whether God exists or is merely projection. Whether the significance I find or the signs I see represent nothing more than my wish for meaning, or have a validity beyond my desires and my consciousness.”

“Will,” Daniel says. “Here's a place where I'm afraid I have to be textbook. Call attention to what you already know.”

“Wait, wait.” Will holds up his hand, laughing. Almost laughing. Every time he does laugh in Daniel's company he's aware, as he didn't use to be, of how similar it feels to crying. The rhythm of it, the way it tightens in his chest, stretches his face. “I heard it, too. I know what you're going to say.”

“Tell me.”

“My use of the word
obsessing
to characterize my thinking about God.” Daniel nods. “I know, I know.” Will's voice assumes the bored tone of rote repetition, with a little twist, a lilt, of self-parody. “What is it I'm trying so hard not to perceive? What is it that my obsession defends me against?”

“Exactly.” Daniel replaces his pen in the leather tray next to his pipe stand. Though it's been many years since he's smoked, he keeps his pipes on his desk. Sometimes, while Will talks, he takes one and fiddles with it, using a handkerchief to polish its bowl, or holding it, empty, between his teeth, and Will knows these aren't the idle acts they seem but a conscious attempt to disarm him, to suggest the older man isn't listening as closely as he is.

“Remember when I asked if you considered psychoanalysis a type of conversion experience?” Will says.

“Remind me.”

“It was a long time ago, years ago. I'd reached a moment of exultation, very excited about what we were doing because suddenly everything was illuminated. Flooded with light. I couldn't separate my . . . well, it was a form of ecstasy, and I didn't separate it from what would be described as a religious experience, scales dropping from before my eyes, however you want to describe it. And I asked didn't you think psychoanalysis was a religion as much as a science? It was a faith, Freud was a prophet, training analysis the conversion experience—a dramatic, road-to-Damascus-caliber revelation.”

“What was my answer?” Daniel says.

“I don't know. I was so delighted with the question—really an observation couched as a question—that if you disagreed with me, I doubt I'd have heard you.”

Will and Daniel stand, Will noting, not for the first time, that he and Daniel wear almost identical glasses, rimless bifocals with pewter-colored stems. Daniel fastens the middle button of his suit jacket. He holds his hand out to take Will's. “Next week?”

“Next week,” Will agrees, comforted by the promise of speaking with Daniel again soon, even though these sessions don't seem to be helping. At least not with respect to the forbidden fantasies—the fantasies Will wants to forbid. They haven't lessened the frequency or the virulence of his lust attacks at all.

Increasingly, Will worries he'll succumb to what he'd reassure a patient was an innocuous normal outlet, and not the symptom of some monstrous psychopathology. He'd remind the hypothetical patient that even the most civilized gentlemen have their brutal fantasies. Especially the most civilized.

But Will isn't his own patient. He isn't hypothetical. What he is, is afraid. He doesn't feel he knows himself anymore, and it seems only a matter of time before he's no longer daydreaming but acting. Before he becomes the very thing he fears: a portion of unhappiness and ill fortune for the people he loves, the family he wants, brick by brick, to protect.

7

It was two months or more after the reunion that Will e-mailed Elizabeth to apologize. He hadn't intended to put it off so long, but the wording kept tripping him up; he wrote draft after draft that he never sent. Please forgive me, he'd begin, typically,
or at least understand my ill-advised request.
Then he'd pause, delete
ill-advised,
or
foolish,
or
ridiculous,
whichever he'd chosen, put it back in, take it out, try to come up with a better word, fail, continue,
as proceeding from the context. I find such events disorienting, and it seems that a couple of glasses of wine were sufficient to enflame
my imagination. You have my word that I will not pursue the matter we
discussed. Best, Will.
He'd read it over, change a few words, change the last sentence.
You have my word that, though I remain interested in the
question of your daughter's paternity, I will not attempt to contact her.
He'd change it back, delete the letter in its entirety, write another that was, but for a few articles and commas, identical to the first.

Finally, one day, it was already September, after a lengthening pause during which he wasn't so much thinking as staring, he hit the send button.

She hasn't replied. Not after a week, not after a month. Of course, he should never have voiced what was, he understood too late, a fantasy. A mistake to have mentioned anything about hair to Elizabeth. He blew it, and undoubtedly this was for the best. So why does he continue to check the mail so assiduously? Why, after more than a month of silence, is he still waiting to hear from Elizabeth? Thinking about making love to her? Well, not love.
Plank
would be the word. It's with pleasure that he imagines himself planking Elizabeth, changing the expression on her face from one of self-satisfaction to . . . to what? Astonishment. The one indelibly delightful memory of the reunion was the look on her face when he suggested she mail him one of her daughter's hairs.

For most of his professional life, Will has preferred working with women patients, who generally articulate their feelings more intelligently than men and whose emotional lives are more available to examination. But now it's the male patients upon whom he depends for relief. No matter that their progress is slow, their insights infrequent. At least he doesn't want to jump their bones. Three of his five new patients are men who have added their voices to what often strikes Will as the attenuated morality play of his work, a sprawling, incontinent production that could be titled “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Replete with crises and lacking a resolution, this drama energetically addresses anger, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, ignores vanity and pride (if he had to choose whether this reflects his particular moment in history or the nature of psychoanalysis, he'd go with the former), and showcases lust.

“I love her,” the guilt-riddled womanizer tells him. “I do love her. She thinks I can't love her and screw other women, but she's wrong. And it's not like we don't have great sex. Twenty years, and we're still hot for each other.”

“So it isn't a matter of turning to other women for what your wife won't give you?”

“No, it's a matter of . . . I don't know what it's a matter of. But in the moment, when I'm with a woman, any woman, it's as if—this is preposterous, but at that moment I'm convinced that if I don't have sex with whoever it is, I'll never be able to get it up again. So, even though I'm aware that I'm sabotaging my marriage and maybe even my whole family, I can't not do it. It's compulsory, and not just from the point at which I'm in bed with whoever she is, but from the moment the idea of sex with that woman comes into my head. It's like the old expression ‘Use it or lose it' has turned into some kind of spell, or curse. I end up screwing all kinds of women I don't even want to, when I don't want to.”

He keeps talking even though he's seen Will look at his watch. “I've tried other things—everything,” he says. “Acupuncture. Hypnosis. We've gone to couples therapy. Nothing works.”

“Use it or lose it?” Will asks. The hour's up, but finally it seems as if they're on to something.

The man nods. “I even hear it in my head,” he says. “Well, I hear a lot of things like that, phrases that get stuck in my head.”

“Tell me about them.”

The man shrugs self-consciously. “Some just bug me,” he says, “like that old ‘Step on a crack, break your mother's back.' And the other one that always pops up when I walk outside. As soon as I see dog crap, I hear ‘Eat shit and die.' Well, obviously I don't act on that, but the words stay in my head. They play over and over until something, I don't know what, distracts me or turns them off somehow. I can't tell you how they stop because as long as I'm trying to turn them off, I can't, you know? They have to stop when I've given up, when I'm not paying attention anymore.”

“Are there others of these directives?” Will asks. “Others you can remember?”

“Oh, yes, many of them. There's ‘Haste makes waste' and ‘A stitch in time'—things like that. ‘No pain, no gain.' ”

“Sayings, you mean? Aphorisms?”

“Yes. But while most of them bother me by repeating over and over, the ‘Use it or lose it' one forces me to act because the idea that it's true, that I will lose it, is so powerful.”

“Do you avoid cracks in the sidewalk?”

“I guess I do, yes.”

“Do some of these directives occur more frequently than others?”

“No. At least I don't think they do.”

“And mostly they stop when you obey?”

“Yes. I hadn't spelled it out that way to myself, but you're right.” Will makes a note. He's allowed the new patient to use up not only the few remaining minutes of his hour—he's never been one for forcing a fifty-minute break-off—but a little of the next patient's as well, and she comes in glaring at him. It's six minutes past.

“Maria,” he says, standing to greet her. “Please forgive me. The . . . the gentleman whose appointment was immediately before yours was describing a complicated set of circumstances. You know I don't like to cut people off.”

She nods, looking slightly mollified. “It's okay, I guess.”

“Please,” he says. He gestures toward the couch. “I was hoping that today, as I have a cancellation following your session, we could run overtime. If your schedule allows, that is.”

“Yeah, thanks, okay.” She hangs her coat in the closet but keeps her purse with her, lies down holding it in front of her crotch. Several times, she has pointed this habit out to Will, as if afraid he hasn't picked up on this self-conscious Freudian allusion. He never takes the bait when she asks him what it might mean, just lobs the question back at her.

“I feel like you're always watching me,” she says as soon as she's comfortably settled.

“Yes, I remember. We were talking about that last week.”

“No matter what I'm doing—I can be at work or eating dinner or changing my clothes or even having sex, and I get this feeling that if I look up, you'll be standing there. Not saying anything, just watching me. Making your silent judgments.” She uses her hands as she speaks and doesn't return them to her purse during pauses but leaves them hanging in midair, above her chest. “Well,” she says, “don't you have any response to that?”

“Yes,” Will says. “I'm wondering why you think I judge you.”

“Because you do. You sit there thinking how purposeless and stupid my life is.”

“Why do you imagine me thinking that?”

“Why wouldn't you? After all, whatever I do or feel, I come here and tell you all about it. So you might just as well be there with me. Then you could see exactly how stupid and shallow I am.”

“Do you think you might like to have someone with you all the time? Someone to watch over you?”

“Why would I want that?”

“It's not so unusual a wish. People get lonely.”

“I'd like to be lonely! I'd like to have a minute to myself. But you make it impossible for me to have any privacy even when I am alone. I told you, it's uncomfortable. It's not something I enjoy. It's like I have a built-in peeping Tom.”

“But Maria, it's you who's invented this, the idea of my secretly watching you. And you who imagines that my observations are judgmental.”

“Omniscient,” she says.

“Omniscient?”

“Yes. Because you're in my head, too, so you can see what I'm thinking.”

“Go on,” Will says when she falls silent. But she says nothing, and he finds himself feeling impatient. He looks past the couch to the dance studio across the street, through whose windows he sometimes watches the students, children mostly. Today it's a group of little girls about the same age as Samantha, although he can make out a boy or two. Beginners' ballet, he guesses, a lot of antic warming up followed by a halting review of the basics. The teacher, a young woman in black leotard and tights with red leg warmers, stands at the front of the class, holding a position until the three rows of would-be dancers have assembled their limbs in an approximation of her own. Then she goes painstakingly from one child to the next, nudging feet, realigning arms, a process that requires her to stoop and squat, patiently doing again and again what she must have done countless times before. From across the narrow street, Will can see her wide smiles of encouragement. Her energy and enthusiasm make him feel tired, even old. What—if anything—distinguishes his work from hers? Does he not spend hours each day nudging and straightening, supporting mostly doomed attempts to approach an ideal from various points of stubborn individuality? After each position, the teacher has the class jump up and down and shake their arms and legs, presumably in an effort to dispel energy and make them pliable enough to attempt the next.

“You're just,” Maria blurts, “I don't know. It's what I said—as long as I'm going to tell you, you might just as well be there. In my bedroom.” She stops there, and Will is silent, waiting. “It feels the same as when I used to get in trouble and my mother would make me wait in my room until my dad got home,” she says.

“What does?”

“Your watching me.”

“How? How does it?”

“Because. It just does, that's all.”

“Do you think perhaps you're feeling angry with me and would like to punish me?” Will prompts, unusually direct, but over the past five years Maria has proved herself someone who can get stuck on a topic for weeks, marching the two of them over and over the same territory.

“Angry about what?”

“Well, I remember that you were upset with me last September, after I had been away during August. We spoke about your feeling abandoned.”

“But why would that make me want you to see into my private life? Stuff like with my boyfriend—stuff that's intimate. I mean, why would I want you to see me naked or having sex?”

“Tell me if this sounds possible,” Will tries. “You'd like to believe that my life is boring, empty, and doesn't include intimacies like those you share with your boyfriend.”

Maria lies still on the couch, says nothing.

“Wouldn't it be that much more gratifying if I were to witness your interesting life? And know that my own was comparatively barren?”

She pulls her purse up, hugging it to her stomach. It's one of the few times her handling it doesn't strike him as premeditated. “I think”—she takes a deep breath, starts over. “I think maybe I want you to see me with my boyfriend so I can prove to you that I don't have any . . . any of those feelings for you.”

Can it be true that all of Will's patients are consumed by the topic of sex? Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex. Has he done this to them? Communicated his disease?

The last appointment of the day is an intake, a tall young woman, leggy like a teenager and decorated with what he's come to regard as the usual assortment of tattoos. She sits sideways in the armchair, her back against one padded arm, her legs over the other. Two stainless steel studs connected by a post sit on either side of the pinch of flesh just above the bridge of her nose. Placed where they are, the little orbs disturb him as might a smaller, brighter pair of eyes between her own pale blue ones, themselves offset by owlishly smudged eyeliner and mascara. She's attractive in a sulky, ill-kempt way, her hair falling unevenly around her face, appearing to have been hacked rather than styled. More likely, styled expensively to look as though hacked. As she talks she chews one of her nails, all of which are bitten to the quick, and armored with silver rings.

“So,” she says, “that's it, I guess.”

“Where do you meet these men?”

“Bars mostly. Except the one I'm going to do next will be an art-history professor. So I'll pick him up at the faculty house.”

“The faculty house?”

“Uh-huh. It's my work-study gig. I waitress there.”

Will tries to picture the young woman in a waitress outfit along with the studs, tattoos, and smudged mascara. She doesn't present herself as a person who would take orders politely. “That's unusual financial aid, isn't it?” he asks her.

“It would be, yeah. But it's not financial aid, per se. See, there's hardly any teaching slots in classics; there's maybe five TA's in the whole department, so if you're a doctoral student, eventually you end up with these funky jobs. Quasi-official. The department secretary will hunt something down for you if you're willing to, like, grovel and curry favor. Which is the definition of higher education, basically, at least as far as I can figure. I'll maybe go into teaching if I ever get out of there. I wouldn't need an education degree to get hired by a private school.” Speaking about her future, she looks earnest and sober, not the disaffected slacker who threw herself into the chair but a scholarly disciple whose postmodern finery might peel right off, like a Halloween costume, and reveal one of those laurel-wreathed heads from a Roman coin. “It's not as impractical as it seems,” she adds. “Classics are cool again. They're making a comeback.”