Two facts. My mother lost in the Egyptian tombs of the Metropolitan Museum. Melinda sitting with her back to me.
Sometimes in bed in the morning Adrienne would see something in my face and say, “What?”
I am wary these days with Melinda, take a distant and paternal tone in our sessions. She comments on my apparent disaffection, says it hurts her that I no longer care for her.
Her left breast is slightly higher than the right, I notice. The disparity touches me, takes my breath away.
Her new phase is less confrontational. She seems to court my sympathy, wants me to be pleased by the progress she is making.
Am I getting ahead of myself? I have fallen into disorder, have lost the thread of events.
It is another time. The question comes up at an unexpected moment. “Do you find me attractive?” she asks, looking sagely skeptical, aware of performance.
“What did I tell you the last time you asked?” I say.
“I can’t trust your answer,” she says, looking up shyly under hooded eyes. “How could you say no? I mean, you’re trying to build up my sense of self-worth.”
It is not what she says — do I even remember it as precisely as I pretend? — but the unspoken context we share.
I ask her if there’s some way I can prove to her that I find her attractive.
The question enlists a sly smile and a delayed shrug. There are six minutes left in our fifty minute hour. I know that the next time we meet, which is two days from now, we will fuck. I have made an oblique offer and she has given oblique acceptance.
Reading over what I have written, I can see how melodramatic, even pathological, this all sounds. I knew what I was about to do was unethical and at the same time I felt driven to do it, felt the need to bust loose, to take what I had previously considered unacceptable risks. And maybe, said arrogance, in its nasty whisper, it would do us both some good.
I was resolved that it would happen once and once only, a demonstration of my attraction to her, and then we would use it as an area of exploration in her therapy. I have a predilection for being defensive so I will stop myself here to say that whatever the extenuating circumstances — I am imperfect, I am human — I am fully responsible for what happened with Melinda.
Outside of my professional commitments, I am a man of obsessive urges, sudden fixations, deep pockets of need. I have never learned to put off having the things I want. My tolerance for frustration is small. I sometimes, out of the blue, ache with undefined longing. Unaccountable things fill me with desire, present themselves as unavoidable needs. I barely slept the night before, was in a revved up state the next morning. Rebecca took note of it. “Daddy’s in a silly mood,” she said. Adrienne made an acerbic remark disguised as good natured teasing. “You used to be funnier,” she said, withdrawing herself, fading out of the picture.
Having decided on a course of action, I gave my attention to logistics, the where and how of the matter. The idea of making love to her in my office, on the couch or on the rug, gave me pause. Yet I couldn’t very well take her to a hotel without trashing the therapeutic situation altogether.
And then just before she was scheduled to arrive, I had a change of heart, decided not to pursue the matter further.
When she didn’t show up on time — she was not usually late — I assumed she wasn’t coming, assumed further that she had decided to break off treatment with me. I felt rueful.
I’m not very observant as to what women wear — it is the effect rather than the details that catch my attention — but I was aware that Melinda, when she made her belated entrance, was wearing a red dress with black trim. She didn’t sit down, stood alongside her chair as if keeping it company. My sense of her was that she was glowing, that she was absolutely radiant.
I disguised my anxiety in exquisite self-possession. Her reality testing may have been weak in other circumstances, but Melinda understood my intentions in the full flower of their confusion.
There is no point in going on with this, in recounting how we got from here to there.
We used the seldom-used analytic couch for our transaction — I was glad to find some service for it — then spent what remained of the hour talking about what it was like.
It was like: good for me. Like that.
I remember her saying this much. “I feel, you know, that I’ve corrupted you.”
With the putting on of my pants, I moved back into the role of therapist. “What makes you think you’re so powerful,” I said.
“I can get any man I want,” she said, blushing. “I got you, didn’t I?”
“Is that how it feels to you?”
“I feel used,” she said. “I feel that you’ve taken advantage of me. I feel that you don’t really like me. Not really like me. I feel that you shouldn’t have done what you did. I feel that I’ve ruined everything. I’ll never get well after this.” Her eyes filled with tears.
I maintained an appropriate distance, performed my role as it suited me to perceive it.
The next three sessions followed a similar pattern. Melinda would arrive late, offer a perfunctory greeting, then lie down on the couch with her skirt above her knees. Although it had been my conscious intent not to continue the physical relationship, I didn’t have the heart to deny either of us its melodrama. The sex was unexceptional, took place, we pretended, for the sake of the discussion in its wake.
What feelings did it excite? For me, it excited a sense of shame, a moderate not unbearable sense of shame. For Melinda: I no longer thought of Melinda’s feelings as apart from mine.
I was collaborating with Melinda’s fantasy, proving to her that she was capable of winning her therapist’s (and father’s) love. Can that be right? I am something of a literalist. I was not, despite the evidence of my behavior, lost to blind urge.
If I didn’t stop this affair, it was because I didn’t want to stop, was getting something from it that outweighed its disadvantages. It gave me a sense perhaps of power and accomplishment. Is that it?
I have the illusion that if I can say the right thing to Adrienne, she can’t help but love me again or recognize (in that vast backwater of repressed feelings) that she hadn’t stopped loving me. The words don’t come, refuse to announce themselves, though the illusion itself sustains me.
I feel surges of passion for Melinda when she isn’t there, particularly when she isn’t there, my need for her compromised by her actual presence.
Melinda misses her appointment, leaves a garbled message with my answering service about some prior commitment. I feel vaguely needy the rest of the day, lack energy, doze during one of my sessions at the hospital. The patient, a lingerie fetishist, is so self-absorbed that I could put a mannequin in the room with him and he would go on with his obsessive story. Peter told me when he had an affair with a patient he felt so guilty he expected to be pulled out of bed at night — he once actually heard footsteps — and be carted off to jail.
I have a dream the next night of dying, wake in a state of grinding anxiety, barely able to breathe. I haven’t felt this vulnerable since the early days of analysis — my first analysis. (First analysis=first love.)
Melinda comes in, coughing, huddled over, removes her scarf and coat and, without acknowledgement of me, begins to talk about an experience with her boy friend, Phillip. No reference is made to what’s gone on the past three — three or four — sessions with us. It’s as if I’m hardly in the room with her, as if she’s talking in a dream.