“Yes?” David asks, as if reading his mind.
“What?” Alex J says with a start.
“I thought you were about to say something.”
“Why would I be about to say anything?” Alex J says curtly.
“Sorry. I thought you were.”
There is another long silence. David wonders what sort of a surprise Kate has cooked up for his birthday tonight. She keeps calling it a “party,” but he hopes she hasn’t been foolish enough to have planned a real party, with guests other than themselves. He recognizes that over the past week he’s become if not entirely reckless then certainly somewhat less than cautious. He hopes she hasn’t taken this as a signal to...
“...weather will be hottest,” Alex J is saying.
“Yes?”
“Were you asleep?” he asks.
“No, no.”
“Then what did I just say?”
“You said the weather will be hottest,” David says, and takes a wild guess. “While I’m away. In August.”
“Yes. How often do you fall asleep when I’m talking?”
“Never.”
“I’ll just bet.”
“You’d lose.”
“When the dresses are thinnest,” Alex J says. “These flimsy little dresses they wear.”
David says nothing.
He waits.
“When the weather is hot, I mean,” Alex J says. “Did you ever read that story by Irwin Shaw?”
“Which one is that?”
“‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’?”
“Yes?”
“That’s what it is, you know. The way they dress in the summertime. I wouldn’t be doing this if it was the winter. Following them home, I mean. It’s just because it’s...”
What? David thinks.
“...the summer. These skimpy little dresses they wear.”
Following them home? David thinks.
Alex J is a thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker who commutes all the way from West Ninety-third to Wall Street by subway every weekday and sometimes on weekends as well. He is married and has three children, and the reason he’s been coming to see David for the past year now is that a month before he sought help a woman he was rubbing himself against on the subway suddenly jabbed her elbow into his gut and yelled, “Get the hell away from me!” To Alex J, this was the equivalent of finding snakes in his bed. Fearful he would be arrested the next time he rubbed up against someone, or inadvertently touched someone, God forbid, Alex J came to David to confess his irresistible urges.
Alex J is what is known in the trade as a frotteur, from the French word for “a rubber,” he who rubs. In Alex’s case, “he who rubs” does so against thinly clad women in the subway, a crime defined as submitting another person to sexual contact without the latter’s consent, or — as David had reason to look up seven years ago when he was treating another such patient — “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person not married to the actor for the purpose of gratifying the sexual desire of either party, whether directly or through clothing.” In other words, if Alex J gets caught doing what he’s been doing (for the past six years, it turns out, and not for just the six months prior to his subway epiphany a year ago this July) he is in danger of spending anywhere from three months to a year in jail — small potatoes unless you happen to have a wife and three kiddies at home, hmm, dollink?
David is not here to keep Alex J out of jail, though this in itself is not a minor consideration. He is here to lead Alex J to a discovery of the root causes underlying his behavior, so that he may better understand it, and control it. But now...
And perhaps this is simply a ruse, perhaps Alex J is merely telling him all this as a way of making sure David is really listening. Think you can go away for the whole month of August, huh? Okay, now hear this, Doctor!
What David now hears is that Alex J, in addition to deliberately seeking out on train platforms any woman or girl of any age who seems clothed in what he calls “a flimsy provocative dress,” and following her from the platform onto the rush-hour train, and allowing himself to be pushed against her by the rush-hour crowd, positioning himself strategically behind her, and rubbing himself against her until he achieves erection and on at least one occasion orgasm...
What David now hears is that Alex J has in recent weeks developed an alarming new symptom that could land him behind bars for a very long time. Perhaps because he is afraid that his antisocial underground behavior will indeed lead to arrest and incarceration should he one day mistakenly rub up against a female detective third grade in a gossamer summer frock, he has taken to following women he feels certain are not cops and who, he feels equally certain, will not resist his advances when he makes his desires known. In short, he is on the edge of committing rape.
This is what he begins talking about ten minutes before his hour ends on this Thursday before David leaves for the entire month of August. This is how he has captured David’s full and complete attention. He is no longer talking about subterranean ladies in flimsy provocative dresses. With the clock ticking rapidly to meltdown, he is talking about the provocative aboveground ladies he’s been following home from work, one of them all the way to a Spanish section of Queens.
“She knows I’ve got my eye on her. She knows I’ll make my move soon. She wants me to,” he says, and nods contentedly.
David carefully advises him not to do anything stupid — he actually uses that word — until they have a chance to discuss this more fully in September.
“Oh, sure, Doc,” Alex J says cheerfully. “Have a nice summer.”
That night, when David rings the bell outside her apartment, she opens the door a crack, stands out of sight behind it, and whispers, “Close your eyes.”
He hopes she hasn’t assembled a cast of characters who will yell “Surprise!” the moment he steps into the apartment. Dutifully, but feeling utterly foolish, he closes his eyes.
“Are they closed?” she whispers from behind the door.
“They’re closed,” he whispers back.
He hears the door opening.
“Come in,” she says.
He steps inside, and smells at once the pungent scent of incense burning, mingled with the scent of her own heady perfume, subtler than the incense, underscoring it like a leitmotif. His eyes are still closed. He hears the sound of the door easing shut behind him, the familiar oiled click of tumblers falling as she bolts both locks. There is music coming from across the room where he knows her audio equipment is stacked against the wall. The music sounds vaguely familiar, a symphonic swelling of strings and woodwinds, surely he knows what it is, surely he has heard this poignant melody before. Something lush and sensual, it oozes softly from the speakers, an insinuating strain that murmurs of distant exotic places, faraway caravans, shifting sands...
“You can open your eyes now,” she says.
She is standing some four feet back from him, entirely naked under sheer black harem pants that flare to her ankles, where she is wearing thick golden bands that look like restraining cuffs. An ornately brocaded red silk vest threaded with gold is open over her naked breasts. She is wearing red high-heeled pumps that match the vest and add at least two inches to her height. She stands before him shyly, her gaze averted, her wrists and neck festooned with golden bangles and chains, the fingers of both hands encircled with thick heavy rings set with bright colored stones. Her hair is piled upon her head in shimmering copper masses held by a metallic gold ribbon that glimmers in the pale light. She is an Occidental slave girl transported here to the sybaritic East — for now he sees what she has done to the apartment and recognizes the motif.