Today Arthur K is telling him again about the time he taught his younger sister to kiss. He has got over his pique at David’s five-minute tardiness, has poutingly forgiven him, and is lying on the sofa perpendicular to David’s desk. Arthur K is one of David’s Couches, a neurotic who suffers from extreme bouts of anxiety bordering on panic disorder. Eyes owlish behind thicklensed glasses whose frames are almost as big and as bold as David’s own — but Helen chose them — Arthur K relates casually and with seeming indifference an episode David suspects is at the very heart of his problems. It is as if David is seeing the same movie for the fourth or fifth time.
In the movie, Arthur K is seventeen years old, a high school senior still living with his mother, his father, and his sister Veronica, who is two years younger than he is. Veronica is blond. Arthur K may have been blond at the time; his thinning hair can look somewhat blondish even now, when the light hits it a certain way, but this may simply be graying hair that is turning an unsightly yellow. Back then...
This was fifty years ago.
Arthur K is now sixty-seven years old, a white American neurotic male whose beloved sister Veronica died in a car crash twelve years back, exactly when all of Arthur K’s problems seem to have started. It did not take a Freud or a Jung to make an almost immediate diagnosis when the man first began relating his woes in David’s office this past January.
Now the movie is unreeling again.
Listening, David merely consults his previous sketches and notes. Arthur K’s movie is identical each time; there is no need for fresh illustration. Even the words are the same, Arthur K’s subdued monologue, the privileged conversation he shares with his analyst in this office he considers safe. David knows the man hates him, and is pleased by the knowledge; it means that transference has already taken place.
The opening shot is of Arthur K unlocking the door to an apartment and stepping directly into a kitchen. The family lives on the second floor of a two-story walk-up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, not yet Puerto Rican or black at the time, a neighborhood largely composed of Jewish and Italian families. Arthur K is Jewish. There is a smell in the kitchen that he will always associate with Jewish cuisine, such as it is, a heavy aroma David can well imagine, his own mother not being among the world’s greatest chefs.
No need to sketch Arthur K’s kitchen, David knows it intimately. No need to look at the clock on the wall; it is midnight. And there, sitting at the kitchen table, just as Arthur K has conjured her for him many times before, is a fifteen-year-old blond, blue-eyed girl wearing a pink angora sweater, a dark blue pleated skirt, a string of pearls, bobby sox and saddle shoes; this is fifty years ago, but Arthur K recalls everything in vivid Technicolor. The cup of dark brown chocolate pudding on the table. Topped with frothy white whipped cream and a red maraschino cherry. The glass of bone-white milk. Veronica’s ivory-white skin. The blue-white pearls around her neck.
As David listens, his mind begins to wander.
Another movie intrudes.
The girl seems to appear out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the path was empty, there is now a young girl on a bicycle, fifteen or sixteen years old, sweaty and slender, wearing green nylon running shorts and an orange cotton tank top, tendrils of long reddish-gold hair drifting across her freckled face...
He yanks his attention back to the present, Arthur K’s movie that is already condensed here on the lined yellow pages in the notebook on his desk, recalled again as his patient recites it for perhaps the hundredth time. Well, not that often; the man has only been seeing him for the past six months. But certainly a dozen times, perhaps thirteen or fourteen times, and yet Arthur K seems unaware that he keeps remembering this same scene over and over again, perhaps fifty times, yes, a hundred times, bringing it back in identical detail each and every time. All you did was kiss your sister, David wants to scream. That isn’t such a terrible crime, it didn’t cause her death in an automobile!
But, no, he says nothing of the sort. For now, his task is to encourage Arthur K to talk about his problems — among which is an inordinate fear of driving his own car — to listen in a nonjudgmental manner, to support and to reassure. Later, when Arthur K has fully accepted David’s seeming unresponsiveness as an essential part of the therapeutic “coalition,” so to speak, then perhaps David can begin to offer tentative interpretations of why Arthur K (or any of his patients for that matter) experiences such feelings or why he acts or reacts in such and such a manner on such and such an occasion.
For now, Arthur K’s movie.
Again.
Arthur K sits at the table beside his sister. Veronica seems distracted as she pokes at the chocolate pudding with her spoon, red juice from the cherry staining the frothy whipped cream.
David’s earlier notation on the lined yellow page reads 
Veronica the Virgin sips at her milk, white against her virginal white skin, blue-white pearls at her throat. Arthur K has taken a second chilled dark brown chocolate pudding from the refrigerator and he sits beside his sister now, both of them eating, he hungrily, she disinterestedly, almost listlessly. Their family is among the first on their block to own a “fridge” rather than an icebox, and his mother keeps it full of desserts like chocolate puddings, or rice pudding with raisins (over which they pour evaporated milk) or lemon meringue pies, or juicy apple tarts.
“She was a terrible cook,” Arthur K says now, “but she gave great sweets.”
David makes no comment.
This is the first time he has heard this particular reference. On his pad he sketches a woman’s lips descending on what is unmistakably a penis.
Beneath the drawing he scrawls in his tight, cramped hand:
Arthur K’s voice is still narrating 
, the big hit movie of 1945. David’s attention is asked to focus yet again on a two-shot of Arthur K and Veronica in close-up. Arthur K is asking his sister what’s troubling her, why does she seem so gloomy tonight? “Gloomy” is Arthur K’s exact word; David has surely heard it four hundred and ten times by now. Why is Veronica so gloomy tonight? And Veronica shakes her head and replies, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just... I don’t know.”
Arthur K covers her hand with his.
“What is it, Sis?” he asks.
“Howard told me I don’t know how to kiss!” she blurts, and suddenly she is sobbing.
Arthur K puts his arm around her, comfortingly.
She turns her head into his shoulder, sobbing.
In the other movie that intrudes again, unbidden, the girl with red hair, golden hair, in the sun more red than gold, is sitting on the ground, both hands holding her ankle, bent from the waist, studying her left leg.
“I hit the ground kind of funny,” she says, “I hope I didn’t hurt my leg.”
David is all at once a costar in this bottom half of the double feature, entering the shot, kneeling beside the girl.
Dappled sunlight turns her eyes to glinting emeralds. Strands of golden-red hair drift across her face like fine threads in a silken curtain. The side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposes a hint of white cotton panties beneath.
“It’s beginning to swell,” she says.