I had never expected to find myself in General Shapiro's office again. Shapiro kept pictures of all the couples he'd helped on the wall, the way hunters preserve their conquests. He even had a trophy case which displayed the many awards he'd received. He'd won the Interborough Best Couples Therapist Citation in 1971 and '72 consecutively, and he had runner-up ribbons for 1974 and 1978. He either stopped competing or training from the late 70s until the mid '80s because the next trophy was third place in the nationals, which he received in 1986, and which solidified his status. When Shapiro referred to himself as a world-class marriage counselor, this was obviously the period he was talking about. He'd entered the metros throughout the early '90s, receiving all sorts of awards, but after that, there was nothing. I suppose after all the years in Vietnam and then on the couples counseling circuit, Shapiro, like a fighter past his prime, had finally hung up his gloves-at least as far as the competitive couples counseling circuit was concerned. Still, as he frequently had reminded us, he only wanted to help.
"Do you really want to help us, or to show us how much you know?" Monica had asked some months before, at the end of what we thought would be our last session.
"Isn't it interesting how every time I offer to help, you try to figure out some evil motive?"
"I'm not saying you're evil; you're just like the rest of us."
"Out for myself, eh." And that's how we had left it. We were back again, and there was a surreal quality to it all. Shapiro looked as if he had aged, and I wondered now as 1 had in the past if the frustration of working with us was actually bad for his health. Shapiro liked helping people, but even more than helping he liked the feeling of success. And while I didn't aspire to join the gallery of legendary patients hanging from his wall, I didn't like seeing a gallant warrior like General Shapiro, whose office had been a war zone, crashing up against the shoals of a comparatively innocuous case. For a man who brought together husbands and wives whose jobs literally required them to try to kill each other during the working day, our case should have been child's play, but it wasn't. I knew we had become the mountain Shapiro sought to climb. We were his great white whale, his Moby Dick.
"I told James that I would be happy to see you folks," Shapiro began. "But 1 won't see you unless you agree to come three times a week."
"Nobody goes to couples counseling three times a week."
"Yes, and according to you nobody has a relationship in which they have very occasional and unmemorable sex."
"I told you, most people I know like to fuck and suck and get fucked in the ass. As someone who is proud of the cum on her face, I'd say that every sexual event is like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It has historical importance, if you know what I mean."
"1 was trying to show you a different way of looking at things."
"Yeah, and you made it worse. Now sex is better, but it's more complicated because of the museums. Even that picture on your wall is turning me on." It was a reproduction poster of a 1952 Matisse exhibit at the Gallerie Maeght in Paris. "1'd say three days a week, and we're going to have to hold on for dear life. All we need is one more art appreciation tip…."
"Can 1 make a suggestion?"
Monica didn't say anything; nothing she said would have stopped him anyway.
"Can I suggest that you stop looking at art for a while?"
"But you were so sure, so positive and insistent."
"Therapists try different hats on to see if the right one fits." Since General Shapiro was totally bald, he didn't need to try on different hats; his head size was a constant that could easily be measured. Shapiro reached over to get his appointment book. The hunter had his prey. Shapiro's nostrils curled up. He'd finally snagged his two most elusive prizes. Before we knew it he'd have us skinned, stuffed, and mounted on the wall. 1 knew Monica couldn't bear the thought of all the pleasure General Shapiro was going to get from helping us. We were getting fucked by him. You would have thought that someone who loved fucking as much as Monica did would have enjoyed it. But she liked to choose her partners. This was rape.
"I'm very busy. There are lots of openings in Milwaukee, Akron, Toledo, Dayton," Monica said dismissively.
"I thought we were talking about putting art on the backburner," Shapiro countered.
Monica emitted a horrible cackle that sounded like a death rattle. She had many horrible traits, but this expression of her disgust with Shapiro made my blood curdle. "We never said anything. You said it." We were back to step one with Monica finding fault with anything General Shapiro tried to say. Monica had an ability to dissect a person's sentences that would have made her the envy of even the most gifted analytic philosophers. The problem was that she had spent so much of her adult life fucking, she had had little time to develop a well-rounded intellect to match. And most of her comments were about as helpful to a therapeutic encounter as a slasher is to a street whore.
The weeks that followed weren't any more productive. I was earnestly trying to deal with my alcoholism, but Monica seemed more intent on correcting General Shapiro's therapeutic methods than in getting help with the hypergraphia satyriasis that had ravaged her body. When you get so worked-up by abstract expressionist painting, you pay a price. In Monica's case, though the ailment had affected her physically (by making her supernaturally horny), the deleterious results were mostly emotional. Monica was going through a stage where she mounted me whenever 1 was lying down. We didn't have to be in the vicinity of an artwork. The stimulation of the gallery visits spilled over from one day to the next. Her compulsion was so strong that 1 felt she didn't even know I was there, and it brought back the mindlessness of our early encounters. She'd bounce furiously on top of me, roll off, and fall into a sound sleep. When she awakened she started all over again, if I was still there. But it was not only her indifference to my emotions that was the problem; there were times when she was downright destructive towards me. While from a rational point of view she knew it was best that I didn't drink, she found the thought of my staggering in the front door to be such a turn-on that she often pressured me to go out and get wasted. I'd already had a few close calls, prompted by the promise of even more hellishly passionate sex, and 1 began to wonder about her. What was it the two of us really shared? What defined our relationship? How could 1 feel Monica cared about me when she encouraged me to do destructive things to satisfy her own sexual appetite?
"Can 1 make a suggestion?" General Shapiro said during a session when Monica described the thrill she had felt blowing me in front of Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase, even though it was neither an abstract expressionist work nor an original (it was a reproduction we had spotted in the window of the framing store in town). Monica was talking about the incident as if it were progress. She was hoping to go backwards in art history as a way of combating her addiction. If she could end up getting turned on by an Ingres or even by one of the French academicians, she would be making headway. Pleasure wouldn't be so dependent on fetishes; consequently, I would no longer have to remind her of an alcoholic (either in a sober or inebriated condition) to be attractive to her again. In fact, once the obsession was removed from her, she would undoubtedly go back to her earlier state when the smell of alcohol on my breath was a sickening reminder of her father.