Envy (8 page)

Will nods. “I guess that's what makes them classics.”

She raises her eyebrows, and the two studs ascend slightly as well. “Precisely,” she says. Her expression suggests that she's taken his comment to have been sarcastic, which it was not.

“Latin?” he asks. “Greek?”

“Latin and Greek. Latin all the way back to junior high. Greek I began as a freshman.”

Will leans back in his chair, hands behind his head, fingers laced. It's a pose, at once relaxed and challenging. “Well,” he says. “What would you want from this process? From what you've told me, I assume you're considering weekly therapy rather than analysis, which would be a considerable investment with respect to both time and money—analysis is three to five sessions a week. If we were to meet once weekly, our dialogue would still take a psychoanalytic approach, because that's my training. We'd use dreams, fantasies, free association—whatever means by which we can access unconscious rather than conscious material. But one day a week would imply a distinct, comparatively short-term goal, rather than the less narrowly defined and, some would even say, spiritual quest of a true psychoanalysis. And, as I said, more affordable.”

“Spiritual how?”

“Spiritual as in the hope for enlightenment. About the self. The attempt to become a more fully conscious being.” She nods slowly, eyebrows raised in a skeptical expression.

“Was I, like, supposed to be answering a question?” she asks after a minute or more has gone by.

“I'm hoping we can figure out how to help you. And to that end, I was asking what you want to accomplish in here, talking with me.”

“To get over this bullshit, obviously. To escape from this, this, um, this thing, this whatever-it-is that makes me go after these old guys.”

“Old guys,” Will says, deciding to defer practical arrangements until the end of the hour. “Tell me what that's like,” he says.

“What it's like?”

“Yes. What does it feel like to seduce older men?”

She makes a face. “Well, first off, it's not seducing.”

“No?”

“It's collecting.”

“Collecting?” Will writes the word down.

“It's more like that than it is like anything else. I mean, it's . . . that's the only way I can describe it.”

“How does it feel emotionally?”

“Emotionally? You mean . . .” She trails off, looking genuinely confused.

“I mean, are you happy? Sad? Satisfied when the date is over? Frustrated? Do you feel you're courting danger? Overpowered, or do you feel you control the interaction?”

“They're not
dates.
Dates presume, like, a future. These are just anonymous hookups with old guys.”

“Okay,” Will says. “Can you tell me how it feels to anonymously hook up with an old guy?”

The girl frowns in concentration, but it's her thumbnail she's working on, not his question. After a moment she looks up. “I feel like I'm collecting them.”

“All right. Then what does collecting feel like?”

“I don't know, it's . . . I guess I said ‘collecting' because for me it's the same as it was when I was a kid and I had this, like, thing for glass paperweights. There was always one I needed to have, and I'd be like—I couldn't really think about anything else until I got it. So I'd babysit or go through garbage cans for soda bottles to, you know, get the nickel deposits, or I'd do chores. Whatever I had to do, to get the money together to pay for it. And then, when I got it, this dumb thing I'd been, like, frantic to have, I wouldn't be so much satisfied as relieved. Because then I wouldn't have to think about how I needed it anymore. I had it, so I could get on with other stuff.”

Will nods. “I'm still listening,” he says.

“That's it. There isn't any more.”

“Would it be fair to say that adding a paperweight to your collection made you feel as though it was in your power, rather than the other way around?”

The girl studies the freshly bitten thumbnail and returns it, briefly, to her mouth. “I guess,” she says.

“Did you enjoy them once you had them?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, did you spend time looking at them? Were there things to learn about them, like methods of manufacture? Different kinds of glass? Did you get into the history of the glass paperweight?”

She gives him a contemptuous, who's-the-crazy-one-here look. “Nooo,” she says, drawing the word out. “I kept them on a shelf in my bookcase. I mean, they were pretty, but what can you do with a ball of glass? I wasn't into, like, dusting.”

“So it was all about pursuing the object?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“And it's the same with the older men?”

“Pretty much. I have sex with one, move on to the next.”

She falls silent under Will's gaze. A low-necked pullover reveals the words tattooed on her chest to be Latin—at least he thinks that's what they are—letters like those that adorn the entablatures of monuments and big civic buildings, U's written as V's—MVSEVM rather than MUSEUM. When she sees his eye hesitate on the tattoo she pulls at the neck of her sweater to reveal another line of text under the first.

“‘Quo usque tandem abutere patientia mea, ' ” she reads. “It's from Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Except I edited out the name Catiline and used
mea
instead of
nostra.
” She gets up to dig something out of her pocket, then returns to the same position, legs flung over one chair arm.

“What does it mean?”

“‘How long, pray, will you take advantage of my patience?' ”

Will smiles. He likes this girl. “Is Cicero one of your heroes?” he asks as she unwraps a hard candy. A shred of cellophane sticks to its surface, and she tries to pick it off as best she can without fingernails.

“One of my
heroes
? Do people even have, like, heroes anymore?”

She puts her feet on the floor and sits up straight, shoulders back, chest out. “The culture is posthero,” she intones in a low, stentorian rumble, her expression dour and condescending. “Media-saturated, brand-conscious, inclined to mock every virtue from courage to modesty. Posthero and pro-rich-and-famous, heroism representing no more than a few coordinates along the arc of celebrity: conferred, questioned, doubted, debunked.”

Watching her performance, Will has to suppress his enjoyment of what seems an effortless caricature. “Skip hero,” he says. “Is Cicero a historical figure you admire?”

“I guess.”

Will leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. “What about the man?” he asks.

“What about him?”

“I'm wondering if both of you expect the same outcome. Does he—whoever he is—know it's going to be a one-night stand?”

“What else could it be? It's not like we know each other. It's not like we've ever met before.” When Will doesn't speak, she goes on. “Usually it seems pretty, you know, equal. They talk about what they do, their jobs. Or they say what they think they have to, what's required by the, the . . . well, the situation makes them feel like they should flatter me, I guess, tell me I have a great ass or they like my hair or my eyes. Whatever. It doesn't mean anything. Compliments are just, whatever, something to say while we're checking each other out and deciding, like, what's it gonna be, hook or book.” Will raises his eyebrows. “Meaning,” she says, “are we hooking up or booking, as in, like, leaving.” Again she sits up straight.
“Book,”
she intones, “verb, intransitive, to leave hurriedly as if tardy for a meeting of critical importance.” Too bad she didn't choose drama over classics, Will thinks, take the opportunity to act out onstage. “It's not about feelings,” she tells him. “It's not about how I feel or how he feels.”

“What is it about?”

“Nothing. It isn't
about
anything.” Her expression is one of exasperation. “You've heard the expression ‘operate on a need-to-know basis'?”

Will nods.

“Generally speaking, I operate on a need-not-to-know basis. So it's not that I don't need to know about how they feel—I need not to know. Get it?”

“If it's not about feelings, what is it about?”

“God, is this what it's like having your head shrunk? You have to answer the same questions over and over? I told you,
collecting.
I collect them.”

Will smiles in a way that's meant to be disarming. He's usually pretty quick to get a fix on a new patient, but there's something about this girl that he can't quite pin; she's guarded in a way he can almost feel, as if she's sitting on the other side of a pane of glass. “This is what's called an intake session,” he tells her. “We haven't even begun the shrinking yet.”

“Intake?”

“I ask questions to help me understand why you've come to me, and, if we decide to work together, to help me establish a treatment plan.”

“If we decide to
work
together?”

“Yes. Because it is work, and not only for me. Once we begin, you do most of the talking.” She looks at him. “Let's go back to the men,” Will says. “Once you've picked one out, then what?”

“You know. We go someplace. His place. If he's single. Or a friend's place—that's happened. Hotel, maybe. But I'm . . . I don't do, like, cars.”

Will removes his glasses, cleans their lenses with a handkerchief, replaces them on his nose: a little act to diffuse whatever tension might proceed from his watching her talk.

“So we, uh, you know. I take my clothes off, and I'm, like, probably the youngest person they've had sex with for a while, a long time maybe, and they're, well, they're excited. I mean, you know, my boobs are still where they're supposed to be. I've never been pregnant or anything that would make me, you know, stretched out or whatever. I've never lost or gained a bunch of weight.” Having offered the kind of material that takes some patients years to approach, the girl looks directly at Will. “I don't know why, but they kind of turn me on, too. There's this, this aspect to their bodies—like they're not trying so hard, you know? They're not these gym rats lifting weights in the mirror. I guess that in the same way my being young makes them hot, I like that they're older. If they have a little gray hair on their chests, that helps. Chub around the middle, not so much muscle, whatever. It seems weird, even to me, but I do like it. Also, I gotta say, they're better at fucking.”

Will remains expressionless and deploys one of his hard-on inhibitors, a picture his father took of a broken fire escape hung with icicles. He doesn't know why—it's not as if the photograph saddens or disgusts him—but it's usually effective.

“They have, well, what they have is technique. Experience. Maybe it's just that they aren't impatient. They last longer—too long sometimes, but that's better than having it end before it begins. Guys my age, for them sex isn't any different from, I don't know, takeout. They're, like, frantic, hardly bother to unwrap me. Older guys, they take their time, pay attention to what's going on. Ask—beg—to go down on me. They are, no kidding, total, I mean total, carpet munchers. I mean, like, all of them.” Will stops writing. He puts his elbows on his desk, fingers together, tip to tip, looks at her. She's disclosing frank sexual material to distract him from her emotional absence. Either that or she's trying to bait him.

“I've done thirty-seven,” she says after another leisurely examination of her bleeding thumbnail. “Thirty-seven so far. I have one picked out for Friday.”

“I thought you said you were determined to quit.”

She snorts. “Quit? Like with cigarettes?”

“Maybe like with cigarettes. Or any other addiction.”

The girl shoots him a look. “Did I, like, miss something here? Did anything happen that might make it easier, or even possible, for me to, what, abstain by Friday?”

Will puts down his pen, folds his hands on his blotter. “For some patients, those who can be honest with themselves and commit to change, the process of articulating that they have a problem and identifying the behavior they want to stop is enough to begin to change.”

“Would that be me, do you think?”

“I don't know. I just wondered if you were actively struggling to quit.”

“This is my ‘active struggle.' You. A shrink.”

“Yes,” he says, picking up his pen. “Perhaps together we'll figure out what it is you get from these experiences with older men, so that you can discover a different source for whatever it gives you. A source you can live with, satisfy more easily. And less expensively.”

“What's that supposed to mean? It's not like I'm paying for anything.”

“I was referring to the psychic cost.”

The girl returns the problematic thumb to her mouth.

“Doesn't that hurt?” he asks her.

“They're kind of numb, actually.” She puts her feet on the floor and leans forward, holding her hands out. A fresh line of blood has formed at the thumb's tip, and other fingers are bitten to the point of injury, as well. What's left of her nails is surrounded by flesh so enflamed that it puffs up around the nail beds. “Pretty, huh?” she says. Looking at her hands, Will feels a strange leap of sexual excitement, as if he's not just imagining but feeling the heat of those fingers on him, and he has to stop himself from reaching out to touch them.

He has to get her out of there.

“I've gotten these infections,” she says. “Paronychia. From the Greek.
Para
—beside,
nychia
—nail. Like, really excruciating. You can't imagine. I had to go on antibiotics.”

“Have you tried to stop?” He has an erection. It's instant, not the kind of excitement he can dampen. One second nothing, then, presto, all he's thinking is: the next in her collection of old guys.