The Position

  This was all an elaborate way to conceal the fact that he was falling in love with his patient. It wasn’t just her beauty, although that was certainly a big part of it. Her story got to him—the emotional neglect she’d experienced as a little girl, growing up on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital that her father ran, as well as the shocking sexual attack she’d suffered when she was nine. But Paul was also troubled and stirred by Roz’s adult relationships—how unfulfilled she was in love, just like him, and how she wanted more from people, from the world, from sex.

  She’d recently had a boyfriend named Carl Mendelson, a law student who liked to get very drunk and screw her in the backseat of his car. The boyfriend was large, impassive, angry, and though she experienced very little pleasure with him, she’d stayed with him for a year. She’d closed her eyes as he pumped away at her, and cried a little after he left her apartment without so much as a kiss or a tender word. Jesus Christ, she and I are the same, Paul thought. We’re the same. It was so painful to think that just when he’d finally found someone who seemed so similar, she was untouchable. He could never tell her what he wanted her to know: that she was breathtaking, exciting, a wonder. That he wanted to taste her. To bury his head between her heavy breasts and then lower it into her lap and lick her and kiss her and stay there for as long as she would have him, the light blazing, the whole world lit up and blazing and in flames all around them.

  It seemed to him that life had had a way of picking Roz Woodman up like a house or a car in a tornado and plunking her down wherever it felt like. This wasn’t fair; she was a red-haired beauty of a girl who was studying fashion design, and whose intelligence was far-reaching, yet she was hobbled by a low-level depression that was as present as a pilot light. Paul admired her wavy hair, her skirt that spread out all around her in a half-pinwheel as she lay on his couch in the tiny room beneath a cheap print of Christina’s World that some unimaginative analyst had placed over the couch. She wore a thick black patent leather belt that cinched a waist so narrow it begged a man to try to put both hands around it, fingertips meeting in back. He admired the brave associations she made, and the way her voice thickened when she was about to cry. Oh, it was a terrific combination, so what was he supposed to do?

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was hamstrung. He was doomed.

  Paul went to see gangster movies and musical-comedy fluff on weekends to distract himself, and he threw himself into his clinical reading, trying to puzzle out his young patient Ricky’s omnipresent need to seduce shady older men, diamond traders, and high-end bookies, but nothing helped. During the week, when Paul could see Roz again, he was uncomplicatedly happy, yet he knew that all this sensation could lead to nothing. She would be his patient, and he her analyst, and she would never find out the extent of what he felt for her. Still, the happiness he experienced being in her presence in his small, hot office served to blur the enormous sadness at knowing she would never be his.

  Then something happened. It was the end of that first July, and Paul was about to leave for his requisite August holiday—though really, he was in training and hardly deserved such a break, much less wanted one. Roz had been in the middle of talking at the time. She usually talked easily, without much coaxing. She was saying something about her roommate Vivian, who also wanted to go into fashion design, though Vivian’s illustrations were terrible, “like clothes for undernourished secretaries,” Roz said, which made him laugh.

  “Well, undernourished secretaries have to wear something, don’t they?” he’d replied, pointlessly. She’d laughed too, and then he’d laughed again, and there was a long, awkward silence.

  Finally, Paul said, “So. What’s going on in there?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing? Really?”

  “Well, maybe it’s not nothing,” said Roz. “But it’s very embarrassing to talk about. I don’t know that I can say it.”

  “Take your time.”

  “The thing is,” she went on, “I have to admit something I’ve known for a while. Something that’s been bothering me. No, not exactly bothering me, because it’s kind of exciting, but more like preoccupying me. My roommate Vivian says I should say something, so here it is. I have these feelings about you. Strong feelings. It’s kind of come out of the blue.”

  Paul allowed a careful silence, before saying magnanimously, “Everyone has feelings toward their analyst. You know that the basis of a good analysis is the transference. You put on to me all the feelings and thoughts that you’ve had about other people in the past. It’s quite natural.”

  “I know all that,” she said. “But this is something else. Something different. I don’t think it’s just the transference. I think it’s real. I think it’s about you as a person. You as a man, and what I imagine you’d be really like, you know, to be involved with. To sleep with. To have as my lover.” And then she began to cry. Her admission, followed by these tears, made Paul want to burst apart in pleasure, or weep himself from the star-crossed quality of it all. He gazed at Christina’s World over the couch; even the crippled, faceless girl in that field in the middle of nowhere made him want to cry now.

  What he said to her, when he could finally speak, was, “And how does that make you feel?”

  “I already told you,” she said. “Terribly embarrassed.”

  “Yes. Yes. Right. You did tell me.”

  The clock showed that it was more than time to stop. Out in the waiting room sat Miss Fowler and her interior cataloging system. So Paul stood up and nodded formally at Roz Woodman, ushering her out the door, his expression poker-faced, his body clenched tight. During Miss Fowler’s session, he could barely stay in his chair. Miss Fowler was saying something about her Grandma Lou and a bowl of Brazil nuts that she always kept on her table before she died. The nuts were shaped like wooden shoes. They made Miss Fowler think about Holland, a place she’d never been, and which she doubted she would ever visit in her entire life. “Even if I went to Holland, I’d still be myself,” she said bitterly. “Still good old me, the lady who people have to remind themselves to send a Christmas card to each year.”

  Maybe, Paul began to think, he was meant to be Roz Woodman’s lover. The stars were in alignment. They both felt the same way about each other. If he were to tell her he was in love with her, then what would that do? Maybe it would cause her to stand and embrace him, and for him to be flooded with the relief he’d been waiting to feel his entire life. She’d feel it too! Gone would be her cold psychiatrist father, her useless mother, that child molester Warren Keyes who had touched her when she was a girl. Gone would be Paul’s own history, his clueless but well-meaning parents, his own unhappiness. Gone would be the withholding that they had each had to do throughout their lives. Whoosh! Both of them would start from scratch.

  “Don’t do it,” his friend Bob Darling warned him at the Murray Hill Coffee Shop. The two men were the first to arrive for the weekly group breakfast. “Ava Schussler and her henchmen will destroy you. They’ll eat you up and spit you out in little unrecognizable pieces.”

  “I know, I know,” said Paul, and he put his head in his hands.

  “Still,” Darling continued thoughtfully, “that girl is a pretty nice piece of sirloin. I’ve seen her in the waiting room. Red hair. Bet she’s got a muff to match it.”

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” said Paul, and he became frightened that if he didn’t act, then maybe Bob Darling would. He pictured Darling waiting outside the building for Roz to emerge, then striking up a conversation with her about the weather, and even taking her to dinner.

  No. No. Paul couldn’t allow this to happen. He would take her to dinner; that was what he would do. And so, in the middle of Roz Woodman’s next analytic hour, while she hesitantly continued to explore her powerful “feelings” for him, he abruptly cut in during a pause in her monologue and asked her if she thought she might want to go out with him that night to Mr. Lo’s Noodle Parlor in Chinatown.

  There was qu
iet for a moment. “Dinner?” she said in a confused voice. “Is that allowed?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  Silence. “Oh,” she said. “Then I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “I understand,” he said. “This isn’t appropriate. I’ve momentarily stepped out of my role here. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be,” Roz said. “Look,” she went on, “I have to think. This is so strange. I’m confused.”

  “I am too,” he said. “The blind leading the blind.”

  They both laughed a little to relax themselves, and there was no use in trying to return to being patient and analyst. Apparently, in one fell swoop, that was over; it could never be recovered, and she knew it, and they would both have to mourn it separately. She sat up on the couch and turned to face him.

  “Well,” she said, “I should go.”

  “All right.”

  “And about dinner . . . I’m just not sure yet. I might be there, but I can’t promise anything.”

  She left the room without another word, and Paul Mellow sat in his chair for a few more minutes, feeling his face burn and understanding that he’d done something serious, even appalling. She could report him; she’d be well within her rights. He’d crossed a line, jumped a fence, changed the course of his life and hers.

  That night, in the dark recesses of Mr. Lo’s Noodle Parlor on Elizabeth Street, he sat alone at a table and regretted what he’d done to his patient and to himself. He checked his watch. She wasn’t going to come; he’d lost her forever. He’d lost his career, lost everything. He’d have to turn himself in anyway, he decided. It was the right thing to do.

  But just when he’d gotten comfortable with this moral decision, the tiny bell over the restaurant door chimed, and there she was, pushing her way inside, heading right toward him. Psychoanalytic theory had many things to say about misery, but surprisingly few about joy. And this was joy, he knew, as Roz Woodman took her seat across from him in the fragrant room. A waitress handed her a laminated red menu, but she didn’t even look at it. For a while Paul and Roz just smiled stupidly at each other, and then they joked about the strangeness of their predicament, and finally they talked about themselves. He had a great deal to fill her in on, for she knew nothing about him.

  Later, after the soup course and the lacquered duck and the perfect, salty mound of shrimp fried rice, after the orange sherbet and cup after cup of strong black tea, he accompanied her to her apartment on the Upper West Side. The roommate, she assured him, was out.

  In her narrow bedroom they stood facing each other, and then they embraced for the first time. Their faces were close; her breath was a little curdled, he realized, as though she were very anxious, which of course she was, and he was touched by this, not repelled. They stayed there for a few seconds, like characters in a movie who have just been through some ordeal together.

  “Is this okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Roz said into his shirt. “I think this is what I want.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes. I mean, it is.”

  “Because it has to be mutual,” he said, somehow justifying the transgression, making it seem less inappropriate if he could ascertain that she felt exactly the way he did.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I can’t be your analyst anymore,” he told her regretfully, and then Roz Woodman began to laugh.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “No offense, but you weren’t all that good.”

  This hurt him, but it was true—she was a girl who said things that were true. He wasn’t a very good analyst; he’d tried, but it hadn’t worked out. Even if he hadn’t fallen in love with Roz Woodman, this would have been the case. But as he faced the fact of his limitations, he became less upset that his professional life was about to fall apart. He’d find something else to do; he could work in a lab again, with mice. Now he and Roz touched and kissed, and the sensation was crackling and keen. Then he sat on the bed while she stood, and he opened her blouse and lowered his mouth to her breast, a place he’d been waiting to go. His tongue encircled the nipple, felt it bunch and harden, and soon he thought he would go wild if he didn’t do something more with his mouth, his hands, his penis, the bulk of his entire self.

  “God please let me fuck you,” he said, the awful words coming from his mouth in a rush, and she told him yes, yes, do that, do everything. Let’s not be shy with each other, there’s no point to that. We know what we want from each other, and now we need to find out if we can really get it.

  So they were in agreement, two schemers with a crackpot plan. Roz lay down on the bed and first his mouth went between her legs, that woodsy place that men ached toward, as if trying to get back to a forest for a ritual they all knew how to enact, and she was whispering and he was muttering; they were chattering together like crickets. And then, in one swift movement, he threw himself fully upon her like someone flinging himself onto a coffin as it is lowered into the earth.

  His newborn career ended within days. It was that snake Bob Darling who reported him, Bob Darling who could tell, by looking at Paul’s elated face, what had occurred. This happiness had eaten away at Bob Darling and sent him into Mrs. Schussler’s office, where Paul would have gone on his own, anyway. Mrs. Schussler herself hastily arranged a tribunal that included herself plus Sherman Long, Marty Stengel, and a pointy-featured female analyst named Wanda Grink. Throughout the proceedings, held on a Monday morning in Mrs. Schussler’s office, Paul hung his head and stared at his hands, though the shame he felt was beaten through with a kind of goofy pride. It was corrupt to love a patient, that was incontrovertibly true, but it was also, in this case, unavoidable, for Roz Woodman was as delicious as birthday cake, which was not something he could tell these people.

  All he could think about, as he stared at the hawk-faced old Ava Schussler and her colleagues, was that none of them could possibly understand love, or sex, or unfettered gratification. Even Sherman Long, who’d tried hard to be a good analyst, a jolly father, had always seemed too slack-bellied and convivial to understand sexual and emotional need. Marty Stengel was basically an oaf; everyone thought so. About Wanda Grink, Paul had no particular opinion, though an unfair one could have been formed within moments, if he’d given it any thought. The radiator in the office shrilled and banged. There was someone trapped in there and trying to get out, some fledgling analyst who had once been on trial in this very room, the way Paul was now.

  “I love her,” Paul explained to the panel in a strangled, besotted voice. “I simply love her. I know it’s a violation. I know it goes against everything I’ve been taught here. But it’s love. There it is, the real thing. What else can I tell you?”

  “Your so-called love, it is immaterial,” said Mrs. Schussler sharply.

  Paul looked up, making eye contact with Mrs. Schussler, and then, suddenly, he asked her, “Did you ever even meet him?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Freud,” he went on, and he was unstoppable now. “In Vienna. Was he really your analyst, or did you maybe just bump into him once, say, in a butcher’s shop, buying lamb chops, and the rest was a delusion?”

  The expression that came over the old woman’s face then was so disturbing that he was afraid she was having a stroke. He didn’t want to be around for what might happen next, the falling on the floor, the yelling, the recriminations, and so he just gathered his things in a loose armful and got out of there. He couldn’t bring himself to come back the next day to collect the set of books his mother and father had given him, and though it always caused him pain to think about, he never found out what became of them.

  For a long time, Paul and Roz proved that firing squad of analysts dead wrong. Their love affair had lasted, turning into a marriage. All of the analysts, once so powerful and full of absolute opinions, were dead, but Paul and Roz lived on. Eventually their bodies graced the pages of a notorious book, interwoven, aglow, endlessly game for any
thing, on display for others to see and envy and imitate.

  One night, in November 1975, right after the book had appeared and taken off like a shot, Paul and Roz Mellow were driving home after a lecture they had given at the New School. As he drove the car, Paul thought back to that crabbed panel of analysts and wished they were alive right now so that they could see what he and Roz had made of themselves. He wished that they could see the drawings of him in bed with his beautiful wife. There wasn’t an analyst among them, he felt sure, who would not have been jealous of the freedom he’d found.

  His own children, perhaps, had already seen the book. He hoped they had, not so they would be jealous or frightened or, God knows, stimulated, but just so they would know. Because knowing things was better than not knowing them: this was the mantra of psychoanalysis, and though he had long been excommunicated, it was an idea that he still believed.

  Beside him in the Volvo, on the way home from that lecture, sat Roz. In silence they drove through the city streets and the tunnel with its staccato line of lights, then onto the expressway going eastward; worn out and yawning, Paul hunched his shoulders against the night. In the close quarters of the green Volvo station wagon he could detect the tang of wine on her breath and a trace element of garlic. This was merely an observation, with no opinion attached; they’d been too physically close for too long a time to have the occasional drift of wine or garlic or anything else really matter. Always she was a source of wonder, a creature, a mythical beast who loved him, and who made him continually marvel at her beauty and the concentrated essence of her femaleness. Soon, now, in the darkness of the car, Roz dropped off to sleep, her perfume making his nostrils widen and then contract, her hair flying up slightly through some sort of electricity that hummed around her.

  Paul pulled off the road at the Wontauket exit close to midnight, and as they turned onto Swarthmore Circle with its arch of trees and recently tarred surface, its clutch of unmistakably suburban but somehow vaguely noble houses, he turned to her.