Where sex was concerned, a little mystery did indeed go a long way.
After well over a decade of clinical practice I tended to listen to tales of erotic encounters, or supposed erotic encounters, with the same detachment that I listened to the details of marital arrangements over housecleaning or the choice between individual and joint checking accounts.
“Just grist for the mill,” one of my old supervisors would have said about sexual topics in psychotherapy. “It’s all just grist for the mill.” I would nod knowingly to her in response to her maxim, but the truth was that I didn’t even know what grist meant. Still don’t.
I found that I looked back and contemplated the professional road I had traveled more and more as the years passed. Maybe it was a function of age, maybe it was just the fact that I had a growing list of things to look back on. In graduate school I knew a guy who insisted that he never looked back and didn’t even use his mirrors while driving. “Everything I need to see is out in front of me,” he claimed.
Me? I lived believing that whatever I didn’t spot creeping up behind me was likely to take a good-sized chunk out of my ass.
One of the items in my rearview mirror that early Thursday morning exactly a week before Thanksgiving was Diane’s contention that during the prior conjoint therapy I’d suffered from night blindness and totally missed the sexual fuel that was simmering in Gibbs and Sterling Storey’s relationship. I was determined not to make the same mistake twice.
Gibbs and I would talk about sex first.
Then serial murder.
“Okay,” I said to Gibbs.Let’s talk about sex. Swinging, right?“But first I’d like to take a moment to check on your safety. Are you all right, Gibbs?”
“Yes.”
I waited for her to elaborate.
“I am,” she insisted.
“You haven’t told Sterling, though?”
“No. And I don’t plan to until I have to.”
“And the California police haven’t contacted you?”
“No, they haven’t.”
“What if they suddenly show up at your door? And what if Sterling answers?”
“That will change things, won’t it?”
“Are you as cavalier about this as you sound?”
“I’m really not. I’m serious about what I’m doing.”
“Then I strongly recommend you reconsider your decision not to go to Safe House.”
“I understand why you’re concerned about me, but I don’t think I can move out. I’m going to stay at home.” She gazed down at her hands and said, “Now do you think we can we talk about sex?”
Seven-twenty, and Gibbs looked like she’d been up for a couple of hours and had spent the time getting herself prepped for tea with some friends she was trying to impress. Her hair-perfect. Makeup-ditto. Outfit? A little too… something.
“Slutty,” Diane would say, of course. But Gibbs’s ensemble wasn’t really slutty, just a shadow or two sexier than almost any other woman would assemble for an early-morning meeting to discuss her sex life with her therapist.
“Sex,” she said, her voice suddenly crusty in a sultry Peggy Lee kind of way. “It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
Was it ever?Instantly, I was wide awake. Even at that hour I had the presence of mind to know that my sudden vigilance wasn’t entirely a good thing.
“ Sterling and I met in St. Tropez. Did we ever tell you that?”
I thought it was the kind of fact I’d have remembered from the earlier therapy. But I didn’t recall previously musing with Gibbs, or any other patient for that matter, about any of the playgrounds of the privileged in the South of France. It was one of those things that didn’t come up regularly in psychotherapy in Boulder, Colorado.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“ Sterling was working as crew on some rich guy’s yacht-a big boat-and I was doing a summer-in-France-learn-a-language thing with a girlfriend after my freshman year in college. We all met at this big Saturday morning market in town in St. Tropez-Oh, you should go! The market was so much fun!-and he and his friends invited us onto the boat for a party later that day. It started with everybody swimming in the afternoon. We were anchored within sight of the beach, and Sterling put on this diving exhibition off the bow. He was really good. Flips and pikes and God knows what else he was doing. He was the center of everybody’s attention. I admit that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“We hit it off; I mean, I really liked him right from the start. But you know, the party was going to be it as far as seeing him went; the yacht was sailing the next morning to Greece or Yugoslavia or somewhere. When my girlfriend and I left at the end of the evening-actually it was more like the middle of the night-I told Sterling where he could look me up in Palos Verdes if he wanted, but I never thought I’d see him again after that.
“Those summer things, they tug and tug, don’t they? Did you ever have one, Dr. Gregory?”
Gibbs’s breathing seemed to have grown deeper. Recalling her youthful memories had softened her persona just a little. My judgment was that she didn’t really care whether or not I’d ever had a summer thing, but nonetheless my focus wavered for half a heartbeat with lusty reminiscences of an ancient August week with Nancy Lind when our families were both-
“Have you ever been to St. Tropez?” she asked, yanking me back tohersummer thing.
I knew she didn’t really want to know that, either. It was merely a way of stressing thatshehad.
“No,” I said.
“It’s not what you think. As a town, I mean. Well, it is, but then, you know, it isn’t. It’s not just the stereotype.”
I was wondering why it was important what I thought of St. Tropez, a topic about which I never expected to have an opinion, let alone one firm enough to degrade into a stereotype. Asking her why it was important to her what I thought, I decided, would risk interfering with the direction of a journey I knew next to nothing about.
All I knew was that it was, directly or indirectly, about sex.
She didn’t wait long to learn what misconceptions I might harbor about St. Tropez. “We didn’t have sex that night,” Gibbs said. “Other people did, almost everybody did. You know, it was that kind of party, but Sterling and I didn’t do anything.”
“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
I started thinking that I’d never been to that kind of party. The kind of party where young beautiful people gather on a rich guy’s yacht in St. Tropez and everybody has sex under the stars. A lost opportunity of my youth, perhaps. I didn’t even recall the fork in the road with the sign markedWANTON SEX IN ST. TROPEZ, THIS WAY.
“We wanted to-I did anyway. I was a prude, and I wanted to, so I’m sure he did. For me, it was the most romantic night of my life. And not just romantic, but… erotic, sensual, you know? The Mediterranean, the yacht, the sky, the music, the wine, and these gorgeous people from all over the world. Sex was in the air. When you breathed, you inhaled it. It filled your nose like the flowers at the market that morning. You sipped some wine, and you could taste it. The sex, I mean. It was everywhere. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Hardly. But I didn’t say anything. I thought she had enough momentum to continue on her own.
“I’d never been to a party like that before. With people so… uninhibited. Brazen. I mean, bold. And with strangers… So many languages… So much…” The final thought drifted away.
I admit that I was curious how her sentence would end, but any words on my part would have been distracting. I waited some more.