Dana Anderson was forty-two. She was wealthy, living with her fourth husband (who was also wealthy, even before he married Dana), and she was delicious to behold. When she had met with Dr. Dilworth for her first interview five and a half years ago, her presenting problem had been "depression." It still was.557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYWqqeh9Y0Z
The chaise lounge upon which Anderson reposed was (professionally speaking) becoming passé. The trend among the more progressive psychoanalysts, especially those who had concentrated on short-term therapies, was for the analyst and patient to sit in armchairs across from each other and to interact by means of the analyst confronting the patient face-to-face. It was a more egalitarian approach which Dilworth disliked because he preferred the patriarchal approach of the old Freudian style. And he still favored the chaise----for all their sophistication and addiction to things au courant, his clients were unaware of the academic subtleties that were making the chaise lounge obsolete. For his style, for his approach, it was best. Men and women, he thought, had never been more clearly understood than Sigmund Freud. His tools of psychoanalysis were symbols of their roles----the analyst upright, the woman recumbent---in this posture her mind was most easily penetrated.
The geometric shape which Dilworth most often thought of in regard to Anderson was the oval. Her face was ovulate, with pale gray eyes and a rounded chin that was the first thing to quiver and show emotion when she was troubled; her breasts, remarkably elastic for her age, were as round as the proverbial melons, and when she lay down they settled to large wonderfully symmetrical knolls; her hips were beautiful ellipses which, when she turned her back to you and bent over with her legs together, did indeed suggest the perfect heart; her thighs emerged from her loins like the legs of a Modigliani woman, though, maybe, not with as much length as one would have liked. If an artist were to sketch her naked, there would not be a straight line within the whole drawing. She was not a woman of angles, but of cambers.
Of all the women with whom Dr. Dilworth had consulted in the past fifteen years, Dana Anderson had to be among the three most vulnerable. She had the sexual instincts of an Earth Mother, but she had no children. Her husbands all had been (and were) unfaithful to her, apparently with little regard to discretion. She was, in turn, unfaithful to them. But none of her trysts had ever led to a lasting relationship, and her husbands----all powerfully driven men who had found her insatiable sexuality an aphrodisiac until marital fidelity bred, rather than children, boredom----eventually left her. In fact, Dr. Dilworth had been her longest-lasting relationship with a man, and occasionally she made offhandedly mocking remarks, which were actually in earnest, to the effect that he wouldn't still be around either, if it weren't for the monthly payments she made to him.
She lay on the chaise now in low-cut pink panties and a thin Bali bra, two straight creases running across her stomach just above the naval. She was high-hipped. Her sandy reddish pubic hair darkened the crotch of her nylon panties, and the aureoles of her breasts were perfectly centered in each translucent cup of her bra. Her hands, small with tapering fingers and lacquered nails, were resting spread out on the flat of her stomach. Her kinky russet hair was pulled up from the nape of her neck and rested on the back of the chaise. They had worked up a considerable heat. Dr. Dilworth was shirtless. He had pulled on his pants but they were unfastened, and he was bending over, tugging at his sock. His shirt was on a hanger on his closet's opened door, his undershirt was folded neatly on the seat of a chair, his tie folded neatly on the undershirt. He had even put shoehorns in his shoes, which sat side by side underneath the chair that held his undershirt and tie. All of these articles were in the same places every time he had sexual intercourse with Dana Anderson. Dana's clothes, by comparison, were still in a crumpled heap in front of the large plate-glass window that overlooked the sun-dappled lawn that sloped through the trees to the river.
"How many times does that make?" Dana was looking up at the trees outside, looking at the underside of the illuminated leaves.
"What?" Dilworth was straightening the toe seam on a nylon sock before pulling it on.
"How many times does that make for us?" Her voice was a sultry contralto, which he very much enjoyed. She put her red thumbnails under the thin band of her panties and ran them to and fro, flattening out the lace.
He was caught off guard by the question, and before he could respond, she went on.
"Free-association time," she said, looking at him, her head turned to the side on the chaise. "One time when I was a child I walked into my aunt and uncle's bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. I was staying with them for the summer. They had two children, two daughters a couple of years younger than me and sometimes I stayed with them for several weeks during the summers as a companion to the girls, to be an older sister. They liked me. On this afternoon they were taking naps. I was sewing little bonnets for them, little old-fashioned sunbonnets. I'd come across the patterns in a magazine. I'd broken a needle and went to Aunt Rhea's room where I had last seen the sewing basket. I didn't think anybody was in there. I walked in and he was bending over like you are now, exactly like you, no shirt, his pants undone all the way down so that his underwear showed, pulling on his socks. I was shocked to see him like that and then I was dumbfounded when he turned his head toward me and it wasn't my uncle. I don't know who he was. Reflexively I looked over to the bed and Aunt Rhea was lying across on her back, naked, her legs propped up and spread out facing him, and me. Her head was thrown back over the far side of the bed, her breasts pointing upward, and her hands grasping her inner thighs. She didn't see me. The man stopped pulling on his socks, slowly raised one finger and placed it up to his lips, signaling me to be quiet. I backed out of the door and left. That's all there was to it."
Dilworth didn't say anything. He finished pulling on his socks and reached over and got his shoes. He took the shoehorns out of his shoes and put them on.
"I never saw that man again," she said. "I don't know why, but I had the impression he was a stockbroker, like my uncle."
Dilworth stood up and slipped on his undershirt, took his shirt off the door and put it on, buttoned it, fastened the cufflinks, tucked in the tail, smoothing it over his boxer trunks in his pants, fastened his pants, fastened his belt.
Dana watched him. "I've often thought about the man," she said, raising her arms and pulling up the hair at the back of her neck, smoothing it. "I can still see his face perfectly. He smiled a little, almost sheepishly, but frankly. I was twelve."
Dilworth went back to the armchair and sat down without putting on his tie. He didn't believe her. That had never happened. Dana could be pitiful sometimes. She was wanting approval of another kind, something more than she was getting through her sexuality, so that she was fabricating a story that she hoped he would find pregnant with symbolism. He had never heard this story before. She was so goddamn transparent. Dana was so hungry for approval that she would never achieve any significant degree of self-esteem. The only way she knew how to relate to people was by offering herself to be used, and every man she encountered accommodated her. She was beautiful; it was easy to do. Dana was going to be pitiful all her life.
He looked at her clothes piled in front of the picture window where he had taken them off her, one piece at a time, and where he had had sex with her, pressing the front of her against the thick glass all the while imagining what it must have looked like from the other side, her heavy breasts, her stomach, her thighs, all the rounded portions of her becoming flat, except for the places where she didn't touch. Women in intaglio.
"Sometimes when we have sex, I imagine myself being twelve," she said. She cut her eyes at him. "Just twelve."
I don't give a damn, he thought, still looking at her clothes. They were silk, very expensive.
She slid one of her feet alongside the other leg, stopping with her knee in the air, her foot against the inner knee of the other on the leather chaise. With the index fingers of each hand she traced the two creases across her stomach.
"Donald," she said, referring to her husband, "is seeing a woman who has practically no breasts at all."
Dilworth frowned, and took his eyes of the pile of silk. He looked at her. She was already looking at him.
"I hired an investigator," she explained. "He's taken pictures of them." She looked at her own stomach. "The guy's good. The detective, I mean."
"Why did you do that?" Dilworth was still frowning a her.
"I keep a file. Rather, my lawyer keeps a file. He arranged for the detective. It was his idea. It was okay with me, but it's humiliating going to his office and looking at them."
"Donald's going to get the shaft?" Dilworth stood and stepped over to a door in his bookcases and opened it. There was a liquor cabinet inside. He took ice from a freezer compartment, put a few cubes in a squatty glass, poured gin over the top of the ice, and came back to his chair and sat down, propping his legs up on a hassock in front of his chair. He didn't bother offering anything to Dana, but he knew she was watching him and he knew she wanted him to offer her a drink too, to be nice, and he knew she would be hurt when he didn't. He touched his tongue to the cold gin.
Dana swung her legs over the side of the chaise as she stood. She ran her red-nailed fingers around the inside of the elastic on her panties, adjusting them, and then went to the cabinet herself. Her stomach was not flat anymore. He listened to her behind him: the ice into the glass, the chink of the stopper in the lead crystal decanter, the sloshing of liquor. She came back by him and lay on the chaise again in the same position she'd been in before she got up. When he looked he recognized the amber scotch. Dana, to put it bluntly, was a lush.
"Probably not," she said. She put the cold glass against the hollow place of her inner thigh near her groin. She held it then one moment before she lifted the drink to her mouth and took a sip.
Dilworth waited. Probably not. He bet himself Dana was getting ready to double her net worth once again.
There was a long silence while they sipped their drinks and he listened to the soft muffled sound of the ice in the glasses.
"Why didn't you offer me a drink?" she asked. She was very still when she asked it, and Dilworth could tell she had to work up the nerve to do it. They had been together for many years that her sessions were now pretty matter-of-fact. He no longer pretended at seduction and she no longer pretended at being coy. He no longer even pretended it was therapy, a travesty that he had stoutly maintained for a few years, referring now and then to their "therapeutic alliance" or her "transference resistance" or the necessity of achieving insight into the nature of her unconscious forces." All of that was gone now, and they had long ago settled into a conjugal familiarity that made her analytic sessions more like a bored married couple's quiet evening at home. She still wanted to be "nurtured" and continued to cling to the idea that he, too, had once believed, but Dana had been one of his few clients whose personality had continued to baffle, continued to refuse to be broken down and dissected. She was as much a mystery to him now as when she had first walked through his doors. His file on her was enormous, for he had continued to compile notes on her even after they had become lovers. She was that kind of woman: she invited exploration, with a smile, almost as if she dared you to try to figure her out. Sometimes he thought he loved her.
"I really didn't think you should have one," he said at last.
She fixed her gray eyes on him, looking at him over the rim of her glass from which she had just taken a drink, looking at him as if he had insulted her. Dana was easily offended. Batting her eyes, she looked away through the plate-glass wall, through the green haze to the bayou. She let the glass rest on her stomach, directly over her naval.
After a moment, she said, "You don't believe my story about my aunt."
He said nothing. Being a psychoanalyst had spoiled him. He never wanted to talk, and half the time lately he didn't even want to listen. It was amazing how powerful silence was. There were certain kinds of people who just couldn't stand it. They would talk as an antidote, even when they had nothing to say.
"You know what?" she said, and a small, ironic smile crossed briefly over her lips. "It's true. It happened just as I told you." She raised her glass and sipped the scotch. "It's true, and you didn't know it. And it's significant, and you didn't realize it."
Dilworth was interested now. "Dana, I don't believe you."
"Jerry, what if I stopped seeing you?" she asked.
Now she had his full attention, but he was careful. He didn't say anything. Nor did she. He waited, sipping his gin. What the hell was she trying to do? Was this a prelude to something? Was she really going to stop seeing him? Surprised by his own feelings, he was disconcerted to realize that he was truly hurt by her question. Had he grown----fond of her, this truly disturbed woman whose complexity, whose disarrayed personality was so exceptional that he could count her among the two or three most intriguing cases he had ever had?
"Would you miss me?" she repeated.
"Why---yes," he heard himself say, and he even heard, to his surprise, an edge of anxiety in his intonation. He was immediately embarrassed by it and was afraid he was going to blush. He frowned at her, tried to put on the face of a scolder in case she should look around.
But she didn't say anything, and she didn't look around. She stared out the window and rolled the bottom of her sweating glass around her naval, forming a wet parameter.
"Haven't we been a lot to each other?" he asked, wanting to hear more of her thoughts, the thinking that lay behind the question. He felt oddly defensive, something he hadn't experienced in a long time. It made him nervous. "It's not everyone I can relax with this way."
She looked at him. "Really?" Her quartz eyes, the very symbol of her personality, indefinable, difficult to be understood, capable of being lost, fell on him. "You don't do this with others?"
"No, I don't," he said. And then he suddenly feared he had said the wrong thing, though he wasn't sure why it should have been wrong. She studied him, and he had the unusual experience of seeing in her eyes that she was reading the lie. he didn't think he had ever seen that in her before, and he was taken aback. What the hell was happening with her, anyway?
"Don't you sleep with any of your other clients?"
"Dana, no, but you don't have the right to ask me about such things."
"About what you do with your other clients?"
He nodded.
"Doctor-patient confidentiality," she said.
"Correct."
"If I didn't see you anymore, would someone else take my place---humping against the glass?" She tilted her head toward the window.
"Now, what kind of question is that, Dana?" It was a vulgar allusion, but Dana was earthy, everything about her was elemental. She had the most natural, the most culturally unaffected attitude toward sexuality of any woman----or man---she'd ever known.557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8PT1ALj6w3
"It's a question to find out," she said. She had been watching him, and now she turned her hair and drained the rest of the scotch from her glass. She let her right arm drop to the floor, and set down the glass. She cocked her right leg outward and placed her right hand, cold from the glass, on the indention of her inner thigh where she had held the cold glass before. "Tell me," she prodded.557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6hzsIXhmxZ
"Dana," he said. "I don't expect ever to meet anyone like you again." It was a response which, if it did not directly answer her question, definitely was not a lie. She made him wait a minute or two, her leg cocked to the side, her hand still in place.557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeTYx564Xa9
"Jerry," he said, "come here."557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDjrQx5RZM6
He hesitated, his wrists dangling off the arms of the chairs as he studied her leveled gaze. Then he got up and went over to the chaise. She reached out and he knelt beside her and she put her fingers in her hair and pulled him down and kissed him. With her right hand, she guided his head, his face, his lips to the cool spot on the inside of her thigh.557Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYahqWsc8L1
