“I am now.”
“Come make love to me,” she says.
The uniformed doorman outside her building is with another man in a short-sleeved striped shirt and dark blue polyester slacks. This is now seven-thirty in the morning, and they are standing in bright sunlight, idly chatting, watching the passersby hurrying along on this busy street. They interrupt their conversation and turn to him as he approaches.
“Miss Duggan,” he tells the doorman.
“Your name, sir?”
“Mr. Adler,” he says.
This is the name he and Kate agreed to on the telephone, though she truly couldn’t see any reason for him to use a false name. Adler. After the famous Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s friends and colleagues who left the psychiatric movement rather early on.
The doorman buzzes her apartment. “Mr. Adler to see you,” he says. David cannot hear her answer. The doorman replaces the phone on the switchboard hook and says, “Go right up, sir, it’s apartment 3B.”
A woman and a dog are already in the waiting elevator. David steps inside, hits the button for the third floor, and then smiles briefly in greeting. The woman does not smile back. Neither does the dog. The woman is wearing a quilted pink robe over a long flowered nightgown and pink bedroom slippers. The dog is a longhaired dachshund who sniffs curiously, or perhaps affectionately, at David’s black loafers. This morning, David is wearing a dark blue tropical-weight suit — the forecasters have said it will be another scorcher today — with a white button-down shirt and a striped red and blue silk rep tie. He looks quite professional. He does not look like someone going up to the third floor of this building to make love to a girl who is waiting in apartment 3B for him. He cannot stop thinking of Kate as a girl. He guesses this is something he should examine. Why he keeps thinking of this passionate twenty-seven-year-old woman as a girl.
The woman in the elevator — and she is most definitely a woman, some fifty-three years old with a puffed scowling face and suspicious blue eyes — yanks on the dog’s leash and says, “Stop that, Schatzi!” The dog, properly chastised, quits his, or her, exploratory sniffing. The woman stares straight ahead, feigning indifference to David as the elevator begins a slow, labored climb, but he knows she thinks he’s a rapist or an ax murderer who is only dressed like a respectable physician making a house call at the crack of dawn, sans stethoscope or satchel. He hopes she will not be getting off at the third floor. He hopes she does not live in apartment 3A or 3C. He hopes Schatzi will not begin barking when he or she catches the scent of Hannah the cat in apartment 3B. Or the scent of Kate waiting in apartment 3B. The elevator doors slide open. David steps out without looking back at either the woman or her hound. The doors slide shut behind him.
He checks out the hallway like a sneak thief about to commit a burglary. His wristwatch reads seven-forty A.M. Sunlight slants through a window at the far end of the hall, dust motes swarming. There is the smell of bacon wafting from one of the apartments, coffee from yet another. From behind the door to 3C, he can hear the drone of broadcast voices. He visualizes television anchors announcing the early morning news. He visualizes people sitting down to quick breakfasts before rushing off to work. This is not a time for making love, but his heart is beating frantically as he presses the bell button set in her doorjamb. There is the sound of chimes within, and then the sound of heels clicking on a hardwood floor. The peephole flap snaps back. The chain instantly rattles off its hook. There is the small oiled click of tumblers falling as first one bolt and then another is unlocked. The door opens just a crack. He virtually slides into the apartment.
She is wearing high-heeled red leather pumps and nothing else. She moves into his arms at once, slamming the door shut behind him, pressing him against the door, her left hand reaching for the bolt as she grinds herself into him, the lock clicking behind him, her mouth demanding, her teeth nipping at him hungrily, his lips, his chin, his cheeks, biting, kissing, her murmured words entangled on their tongues. She smells of powder and soap. He knows her dusted body will turn his dark suit to white, but he ignores this danger and pulls her closer instead, his hands covering her breasts slippery smooth with talcum, a young girl’s breasts, this girl’s breasts, this girl, this girl. He lowers his head, finds her nipples, “Don’t bite!” she warns sharply, though he isn’t biting her, kisses her, licks her nipples, “Yes,” dropping to his knees in his proper blue suit and smart silk tie, parting with his fingers the crisp red hair in its summer trim, parting her nether lips, kissing her there, “Yes,” licking her there, “Yes,” savoring her there as if her swollen cleft is a smooth wet nourishing stone.
Before he leaves the apartment, she tells him if he must use a fake name whenever he comes here, she’s thought of a more appropriate psychiatrist than Adler.
“Who?” he asks.
“Horney,” she says.
He figures Stanley must know, as does any psychiatrist, that during the course of therapy a patient will recover feelings for significant people in his past and unconsciously apply them to his shrink. Stanley has read Freud. Every psychiatrist in the world has read Freud:
“We overcome the transference by pointing out to the patient that his feelings do not arise from the present situation and do not apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something that happened to him earlier. In this way we oblige him to transform his repetition into a memory.”
Which, unquestionably, was the technique Stanley — who, like David, is a Freudian — followed with the patient he’s identified as Cindy Harris, the better to lead her to mental health, m’dear.
But Stanley? Are you in there, Stanley? Do you remember?
“It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which constitute the temptation. It is, rather, perhaps, a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.”
Stanley seems to have forgotten, if not his technique, then certainly his medical task. By “doing it” with Cindy “right on the office couch,” he has rather, perhaps, also broken the mental health profession’s absolute and explicitly stated prohibition on sexual contact or sexual intimacy between patient and therapist.
Why then, David wonders, am I seriously considering whether or not I will alibi the son of a bitch sometime this August?
For however abhorrent he finds Stanley’s behavior, he cannot ignore the fact that if he does become his accomplice, so to speak, he will also be serving his own interests. All day Thursday, this continues to trouble him, to the extent that he begins feeling in imminent danger himself of forgetting his technique and his medical task. His technique is to coax a patient’s memories into the present, so that they can be dealt with more effectively than they had in the past. His technique is to keep his own personal anxieties, hopes, aspirations, fears, cravings or lusts out of this office and out of the therapy. In this office, he is a neutral and objective listener, an indefatigable, nonjudgmental interpreter. Here in this office, his medical task is to guide back to mental wellness eight severely troubled people.
But.
His patients’ disturbing memories are most often sexual in content. As a result, much of his working day is spent listening to Arthur K or Susan M or Brian L or Josie D or any of the others as they reveal — or try to avoid revealing — that the symptoms of their illnesses can be traced back “with really surprising regularity to impressions from their erotic life,” thank you again, Dr. Freud. David accepts this basic premise as an absolute truth. It is, in fact, the very foundation of the medicine he practices here five days a week, save for the month of August.