Marissa Cooper was ten minutes late, but she made no reference to it as she came into his office. She was Dilworth's last appointment in the afternoon. They exchanged a few pleasantries as Dr. Dilworth pulled his armchair over nearer to the chaise than he usually kept it, and Marissa sat on the edge of the chaise and unbuckled her sandals. Today her hair was down, and she wore a polished-cotton chintz sundress with a full skirt and bare shoulders that once again gave him a view of the top of her breasts. He watched them as she swung her feet onto the chaise and lay back.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4PxXJUDJQC
"What would you like to talk about?" he asked, crossing his legs and settling into his armchair.
"My father."
Dilworth was shocked. After so many weeks of inanities Marissa seemed to be finally wanting to get to the crux of her own psychological story. Perhaps the last session had indeed been a turning point. It'd been a long time in coming.
The idea that Marissa should undergo psychotherapy had not been hers, but her husband's, and Dilworth had seen from the start that she was going to need a rather complicated form of therapy. Eddie and Marissa Cooper had been happily married for four years. They had two children, a boy, three, and a girl, one and a half. Eddie was an executive in an successful computer-manufacturing firm with a salary that put them in the higher income brackets. Marissa had help with the children and the house; she didn't have to worry about balancing a tight budget. She was attractive, well-dressed, well educated, and active in one or two civic organizations with the proper social standing. Her life, by all appearances, was very good indeed.
This was common with his clients. On the surface of things, none of them seemed to belong there.
Then, nearly a year earlier, Marissa began making excuses in order to avoid sexual intercourse with her husband. The frequencies of their intercourse decreased. At first her husband believed they had let their lives become too crowded with obligations; they needed to set aside more time to nurture their relationship. He told Dr. Dilworth he had read about this kind of thing in magazines. They just weren't spending enough "quality time" together. Eddie Cooper was a good husband. He began to be more attentive to her; he arranged for occasional long weekends during which the two of them would take short trips alone. He did everything that the experts in the magazines said a man should do to revive a flagging marriage.
But nothing changed. Marissa persisted in making excuses, avoiding sex whenever she possibly could. When her husband confronted her with her obvious disinterest, even aversion, she reluctantly relented to his overtures and tried to discount his concern. But she was still unresponsive and tense. He had sexual intercourse with her----alone---a bizarre feeling that he could not long tolerate. Eventually it became clear to him that she actually was repulsed by sex, though she had no problem with lying in bed and holding him, or to being held by him. She seemed to find this comforting, seemed even to desire it, but sexual interaction beyond this simple demonstration of affection caused her immediate anxiety.
Even with all this, Eddie could not believe the sexual part of their marriage had come to an end. From time to time he would try to initiate sex, believing if he were gentle enough, delicate enough, understanding enough, loving enough, then she once again would become comfortable in their intimacy. The result was that Marissa developed functional dyspareunia, and finally vaginismus. She developed a vaginal rash she could not relieve. She told her husband that her gynecologist was baffled by her disorders and was trying a variety of medicines to cure them. But there was no change.
Finally, their damaged relationship and Marissa's condition became so unbearable that Eddie called her doctor himself, only to learn that the gynecologist had been telling Marissa for months that in all likelihood her disorder had psychological and emotional origins, and he had encouraged her to consult a psychiatrist. He had given her several names and recommendations, but she had not acted on his advice. This discovery led to Eddie Cooper's ultimatum that either she sought professional help or he could no longer live with her. Because she truly loved her husband, Marissa was horrified at his threat. But she refused to see any of the doctors her gynecologist recommended. Instead, a friend gave her the name of Dr. Dr. Jeremias Dilworth. It was not the best of circumstances under which to begin a relationship with a psychiatrist, but it had to do.
He started with a goal-limited therapy to relieve her anxieties, which were the source of her physical symptoms. But even this took longer than he expected, and while he was enjoying being with her because of her remarkable beauty, he was also extremely impatient with the psychodynamics of her disorders. There was little she could say or demonstrate that he had not heard or seen in some other fashion in the context of some other woman's miseries.
"My stepfather, actually," she said. Her sundress had a fabric cord belt and she held the two loose ends of the cord in her hands, toying with them. The small pucker at the corner of her mouth tightened ever so slightly. "He was an executive with Exxon. When we finally stopped running, we ended up here in Tolumura. I remember a period of time in boarding houses still, while she trying to find a job, and then finally she did. My mother is a very beautiful woman, even now. She's only fifty-four. She has a contradictory personality. Though she's very efficient, very orderly, she has blind spots.....about people. She seems very compliant, not pushy, but it's largely a deceptive front. When you stand back and look at what really happens to her, you see that she always comes out on top of things. She's a very skillful manipulator. She looks out for herself.
"Anyway, she got a job with Exxon, a secretarial job, I think. She met my stepfather there. After a while, a year perhaps, they were married. Our lives changed overnight....dramatically. We moved from a boardinghouse in Mesa Verde to an enormous ivy-covered home in Freedom Woods off Winkley Dell Drive. Mother quit working. I was enrolled in private school. We bought clothes, so many clothes. Curt, his name was. Curt Drenning, didn't deny us anything. He was a kind man, and he must have gotten a great deal of pleasure out of giving us a new life. He spoiled us and we loved it, and we loved him for doing it.
"That first year in our new home was like a dream. It seemed to good to be true, and sometimes I lay in my clean bed at nights and remembered the two years of dirty rooms, and I never wanted to live that way again. And I remembered my father, too, and wished that somehow he could have been a part of our happiness, too. I felt guilty about the fact that he was fading further and further into the back of my mind, that he'd become secondary to my own happiness and comfort."
Dilworth looked at Cooper's legs. The hem of her sundress was riding just under her knees, and even though she was not wearing stockings her legs were as smooth and tan as a mannequin's. But her feet betrayed her flesh and blood, especially her ankle and down the top of her foot toward her toes. These were not the swollen veins of older women, but the smooth veins of health, strengthened by several hours of tennis daily. And her skin was fair enough that he knew, too, that if he could see her nude he would see similar veins, though paler, more subtle, in one or two places around her breasts.
"Mother had discovered all the wealth of the Borgias in one prematurely balding executive eight years older than herself," Marissa continued. "And she was not about to let it slip away. Keeping Curt happy became her one aim in life, and she made sure that I realized the importance in this, too. At her constant urging, I thanked him so many times that first year that it must've been sadly comical. And I was grateful, of course, but Mother had me fawning on him to the point of embarrassment.
One day when I got out of school he was there waiting for me. He'd gotten away from the office early and had called Mother and told her that he would pick me up at school. I suspected later that he had planned it do he could talk to me away from her. In the course of our conversation during the drive home, he tactfully let me know that it wasn't actually necessary for me to be so grateful. He said there was an art to accepting someone's kindness and that there were more ways to express gratitude without having to say thank you all the time. He said he knew I was appreciative and that that was reward enough for him. He said other understanding things, too, kind things, as if he knew just how I felt and wanted to put me at east. He spoke to me as if I were a whole person worthy of his full attention. I had never been spoken to that way before.
"That was a magical afternoon for me, because after that I began to be drawn into a feeling of security that I had never known in my life. He won me over, heart and soul, during the brief drive home from school, and it was never to be the same again. I grew to love the man dearly. I was ten."
Dilworth tensed up. Premonition had been an unexpected consequence, an ensuant gift, of his years of practicing psychoanalysis. It was not something he'd anticipated or tried to develop, but it came to him as a natural result of his refinement by continual practice of his own innermost abilities. It was not a gift he'd come to regard with unmixed feelings. Though it had proved to be an enabling talent that had permitted him to better enlighten his clients, it had also had the effect of oppressing him. He was like a man who'd been given a magic sack filled with one hundred pounds of gold doubloons. No matter how many he spent the sack was always full, but in order to have access to the coins he must carry it on his back. If he ever took it off, the gold and all the good it could do in the world would cease to exist. The blessing, and his ability to use it, was also an inescapable burden.
The prescience was not a clearly defined knowledge, so that when it occurred he was racked with anxiety until he could decode it, unriddle it, and employ the new understanding to help his client. So it was with a growing sense of dread that he listened to Marissa Cooper's story, knowing, surely, that today or the next, or the next, her story would turn dark, very dark indeed.
"Those dreams I dreaded of disintegrating? They started to go away," she said. "For a year, everything was peachy keen." She didn't go on.
Dilworth waited. He looked at his clock. She was capable of extraordinary silences. But not this time.
"Don't you have something to drink here?" She turned her head toward him.
"Yes." But he didn't move.
"Can I have just a smidgen of vodka?"
"Stoli?"
"Works for me."
He rose from his armchair and went to the cabinet where he poured a glass for both of them. When he turned around she had gotten up from the chaise and was standing at the window, looking outside. She'd gathered up her skirt in her hands and was holding it above her knees as if she were going wading. He walked up behind her.
"Your Stoli, ma'am," he said.
She dropped the left side of her skirt and held up her hand over her shoulder without turning around. He handed it to her, and she sipped with no hesitation whatsoever, still holding half her skirt in her right hand. He was close enough to smell her. She casually moved along the glass wall to the foot of the chaise.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3gHLaOGj8e
"How long have you had this office? she asked.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡU9djpIGjQY
"Eight years."567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIj1CB4UOR7
"Oh?"567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4KUwUR0qaU
He waited.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡk7l0u3XdQq
"You've heard a lot of stories, then, spent a lot of afternoons looking down at the river."567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXA9EDCqva2
"Quite a few," he said.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6pqTbhyetz
"Do you like hearing them?"567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡacEZjjpfaJ
"It's not a question of liking them," he said. "I try to use them to help my patients."567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBS3RcLIy5n
"You must hear a lot of the same stories," she said into the plate glass. "At least, similar ones."567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡweBsUTTRJC
Now, you know better than to answer that one, he told himself. Everyone wanted to believe his story was unique. He was thinking of this, looking at her hair falling across her bare shoulders, when he realized that she had continued to gather the right side of her skirt in her hand until almost her whole right thigh was showing. It was an extraordinary sight.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡab8GsBk401
"What kind of story do you like?" she asked.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBSwZkGAJlS
There was a moment, and then he managed to say, "I have no preferences."567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbUiuBTaf7q
"Everyone has preferences," she said.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2vIlU4cjCQ
He said nothing, his eyes transfixed on her long, tan thighs. Then her wrist flicked and the hem dropped a little, then a twitch and it fell a little farther. Her fingers held the rest of it. Then, slowly, she started to gather it again, and the tan thighs emerged from the folds of the sundress with the same erotic impact of total nudity. He didn't know why he looked up just then, but he did, and was shocked to see her looking at him from her reflection in the glass. She didn't smile or have the vixen-eyed stare of calculated seduction, but she was watching him. He had no idea what to make of her expression, but it seemed to him----and he was almost sure of it....that she was absorbed in a well-practiced fantasy which had become, through many hours of indulgence, an absolute reality for her. Whatever it was, she was living it as surely as Dilworth himself was living it this very moment.567Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxIDMZVpl46
