`Can you imagine a human being that you would like?'
`Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I'm in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I've got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phony. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.'
`Why do you say that?'
`Your phony code of ethics. You hide behind it. I've sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I've twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don't know what I'm doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I'd like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, "You say you'd like to feel my prick," and I'll say "Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father…" and you'll say "You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back…" and we'll both go right on acting as if the words didn't count.'
Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.
`I don't blame you: I've been acting like as automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.'
Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned from the waist to stare at me.
`What did you say?'
`You feel you don't know what I said?'
But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.
`Holy shit, there's a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I've never heard you say anything
before.'
'Well, Linda, I'd say it was time to end non-directive therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?'
'That's what I just said.'
`First, I think we'd better acknowledge that you're outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much
less than many women, since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he's got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly; that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breath of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you've slept with and who've proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.'
Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished, her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.
`Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concrete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are sounding off about me? You don't know me at all. I haven't told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.'
`Do you want to show me your breasts?'
`Fuck you.'
`Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?'
'You can't judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don't forget it. They know
they've had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you'll hide behind your precious ethics and fuel superior because all you see is the surface.'
`What other good qualities do you have?'
`I call a spade a spade. I know. I'm not perfect and I say so, and I've learned that you psychiatrists are priggish little
voyeurs and I tell you, and that's why you all end up attacking me. You can't stand the truth.'
`My ethics kept me from making love to you?'
`Yes, unless you're a fairy, like another headshrinker I knew.'
`Let me then formally announce that in my future relations with you I will not seek to maintain the traditional patient
doctor relationship and I will not abide by the standard of ethics set down in the code of the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. From now on I shall respond to you as human to human. As psychiatrist human I will advise you, but no more. How's that?'
Linda shifted her feet to the floor and looked over at me with a slow smile, meant to suggest sexiness? She was, in fact, reasonably sexy. She was slender, clear-complexioned, full-lipped. As long as she had been my patient, however, I had not responded to her sexually one millimeter, or to any other female patient in five years, despite writhings, declarations, propositions, strippings and attempted rapes - all of which had occurred during one session or another. But the doctor-patient relationship froze my sexual awareness as completely as doing fifty push-ups under a cold shower. Looking at Linda Reichman smile and perceptibly arch her back and project her (true or false?) bosom, I felt my loins, for the first time in my analytic history, respond.
Her smile slowly curled into a sneer.
`It's better than you were, but that's not saying much.'
`I thought you wanted to feel my prick.'
`I can't be bothered.'
`In that case, let's get back to you. Lie down again and let your mind go.'
`What do you mean, lie down again. You just said you were going to be human. Humans don't talk to each other with their backs to each other.'
'True. So go ahead, we'll talk . . . eyeball to eyeball.'
She looked at me again and her eyes narrowed slightly and her upper lip twitched twice. She stood up and faced me. The light from my desk picked up a light perspiration on her face, which revealed this time no suggestive smile #161;although one may have been intended - but rather a tense grimace. She roved slightly toward me, unbuttoning her skirt at the side as she approached.
`I think maybe it would be good for both of us - if we got to know each other physically. Don't you?'
She came to the chair and let her skirt fall to the floor. Her half-slip must have gone with it. She had on white silk bikini panties but no stockings. Sitting down in my lap (the chair tipped back another three inches with an undignified squeak), .her eyes half closed, she looked up into my face and said drowsily; 'Don't you?'
Frankly, the answer was yes. I had a fine erection, my pulse was forty percent, my loins were being activated by all the requisite hormones and my mind, as nature intended it in such cases, was functioning vaguely and without energy. Her lips and tongue came wetly against and into my mouth, her fingers along my neck and into my hair. She was role-playing Brigitte Bardot and I was responding accordingly. After a prolonged, satisfactory kiss, she stood up, and with a set, drowsy, mechanical half-smile removed, item by item, her blouse, bra (she hadn't needed falsies), bracelet, wristwatch and panties.
Since I continued to sit with a blissfully unplanned and idiotic expression, she hesitated, and sensed that somewhere about now was my cue to embrace her passionately, carry her to the couch and consummate our union. I decided to miss the cue. After this brief hesitation (her now wet upper lip twitched once), she knelt down beside me and fingered my fly. She undid the belt, a hook and lowered the zipper. Since I didn't move one millimeter (voluntarily) she had trouble extricating her desired object from my boxer undershorts. When, she had succeeded in freeing him from his cage, he stood with dignified stiffness, trembling slightly, like a young scholar about to have a doctoral hood lowered over his head. (The rest of me was cold and immobile as the code of ethics of AAPP encourages us.) She leaned forward to put her mouth over it.
`Did you ever see the movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre?' I asked.
She stopped, startled, then closing her eyes completely, drew my penis into her mouth.
She did what intelligent women, do in such cases. Although the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her tongue produced predictable feelings of euphoria, I found I was not much mentally excited by what was happening. That mad scientist dice man was looking at everything too hard.
After what began to seem like an embarrassingly long time (I sat mute, dignified, professional through it all), she rose up and whispered. `Take off your clothes and come.'
She moved nicely to the couch and lay down on her stomach with her face to the wall.
I felt that if I sat immobile any longer she would snap out of it and become angry, get dressed and demand her money back. I had seen her in two roles, sex kitten and intellectual bitch. Was there some sort of third Linda? I walked over (my left hand pants clutching) to the couch and sat down. Linda's white, nude body looked cold and babyish against the formal brown leather. Her face was turned away but my weight on the side of the couch let her know I had arrived.