In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  “The world is the unknown, the unformed, the uncreated,” he would tell her. “The sense we make out of it depends entirely on the perception we have of it. Most of us have accepted the common world view, and so we muddle about at a level of consciousness no higher than that of the New York Times. Now, we all want to break out of that conceptual straitjacket, and the way we do it is through fantasy. And the therapist merely sells one form of fantasy, that’s all, a rather inferior form at that.”

  Their lovemaking almost invariably followed a pointed discussion and they used the heat of their bodies to melt the tension generated by words. Both were sophisticated enough to realize after a while that the content of their conversations were much less important than their function, which was a kind of foreplay. Fishes twitched and cats yowled and birds strutted and people talked.

  Now, they walked back into Lydia’s living room, with her going toward the ringing phone and Fred following at a close distance. His stunt of jumping onto the edge of the balcony had slightly unnerved him. It wasn’t something he’d planned to do, but once the impulse had seized him, his body acted for him.

  He watched Lydia as she moved. She was wearing a pair of yellow hip huggers which set off her full thighs to their most splendid effect. Usually, when working, she wore loose dresses for fear of offending her patient’s images of what a therapist should look like. To complement her slacks, she wore a sheer, black blouse that clung to her torso and outlined her bra-less breasts. They jiggled as she walked, the tiny nipples like bullets in the cloth.

  Fred snuggled up behind her and began to run his hands over her ass cheeks, but the expression on her face as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone stopped him. He watched her for a full minute until she hung up.

  “Bad news?”

  “It’s Marsha,” she said, “a woman I’ve been seeing. She’s at the top of the World Trade Center building, threatening to jump. The police found her purse and it had my name in it. They want me to go over and talk to her.”

  “Of course,” Fred said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Would you please? They’re sending a car right over.”

  They put on jackets against the chill autumn night and went down the elevator to the street where a patrol car, its lights flashing, was just pulling up. They got quickly into the back seat and were sped down the West Side Highway to the twin towers. Lydia put her head on Fred’s shoulder.

  “I saw her just two days ago,” she said.

  “Was she upset?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Did she mention suicide?”

  “Oh, they all do, at one time or another.”

  Realizing that her comment might appear cynical under the circumstances, Lydia bit her lip and added, “I mean, it’s part of the way they have of releasing tension and self-pity.”

  “What did you tell her?” he asked.

  “I gave her the recommended response.”

  “Good God, do therapists have a standard reply for suicide announcements?”

  “It’s a well known fact,” Lydia told him, feeling somewhat sheepish now, “that people who want to kill themselves just go ahead and do it, while those who talk about it are looking for sympathy. So when she said she was thinking that life wasn’t worth living I said . . . “

  She broke off and stifled a sob in the handkerchief she had clenched in her hand.

  “What . . . ?” Fred prompted.

  “I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do it right. Why don’t you jump off the tallest building you can find’?”

  Fred burst out laughing, a loud rhythmic guffaw. “My God, that’s rich,” he said. “That’s so outrageous I wouldn’t dare use it on one of my soaps. No one would believe that it could be real.”

  “It’s not funny,” Lydia snapped.

  “It’s not anything but what it is,” Fred told her. “You can laugh or cry or view the entire thing with cosmic indifference.”

  “Sometimes I think you don’t have a heart,” she said.

  “And sometimes I wonder whether you can tell the difference between real feeling and sentiment.”

  They arrived at the building with a screech of brakes, and were whisked into the mammoth lobby and up a fifth of a mile to the very top of the building.

  “Up and down, up and down,” Fred intoned. “First we were looking down at the world from your apartment, then we became part of the sea of trumped up humanity clogging the streets, and now we zoom up to the skies again, perhaps to watch someone take a long glide to the bottom.”

  “Oh stop it,” Lydia rasped.

  “Some people got no respect,” one of the policemen said, casting a sympathetic glance at Lydia.

  When they stepped out onto the roof, they were frozen in their steps by the sight that greeted them. Marsha was dancing at the very edge of the building, leaping, gliding, striking poses of great solemnity and beauty. One of the policemen was playing a haunting melody on a harmonica. And far overhead, a helicopter hovered, kicking up the chilly air over the entire surface area of the roof. An occasional flash bulb from a reporter’s camera threw the scene into stark relief.

  The young doctor who had been trying to talk Marsha back from her decision came over and introduced himself to Lydia.

  “Why in God’s name is that man playing a harmonica?” Lydia almost screamed.

  “Well, when she started to dance, I thought the best thing would be to humor her. Obviously, she’s lost all touch with where she is and I thought that music might intensify her fantasy and make it possible for us to sneak up on her.

  “And?” Lydia asked.

  “No,” the doctor said sadly, “she’s sharp enough to be aware when we begin to creep forward.”

  Fred, who had taken several steps forward to gaze with rapt attention at the dancing woman, turned suddenly and remarked, “She’s not lost in any fantasy. She knows exactly where she is and what she’s doing.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” the doctor said, annoyed.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” Lydia told him.

  “Well, I’m not sure he’s authorized to be here,” the man in white went on, still petulant.

  “My credentials are in my brain, not on some dimwit sheet of paper, doctor,” Fred told him. “Now why don’t you step out of the way and stop trying to act important. You’ve already proven your complete impotence in this matter.”

  The doctor and Fred squared off to face one another and Lydia slipped away to walk toward the wildly dancing woman. As she went she turned to the policeman playing the harmonica and told him to stop. He looked at her over his cupped hands and his eyes indicated that he had absolutely no intention of listening to her.

  “That woman may lose her life any second now,” Lydia told him in her most guilt-producing tones. “And I’m sure you don’t want to share in the responsibility for that.”

  The policeman took the harmonica away from his lips which had curled into a sneer. “What are you, a cop?” he asked.

  “All right, Reilly,” the sergeant called out. “Enough of your lip! Just do what the lady tells you.”

  With a toss of her shoulders, Lydia marched forward until she was within twenty feet of her patient.

  “Marsha,” she yelled across the windswept plain, “it’s me Doctor Stone.”

  Marsha stopped with an abrupt snap and swayed slightly. Lydia clutched her stomach with the realization of what lay just behind the young woman’s heels.

  “Don’t come any closer, Lydia,” Marsha said. “I know you. You’re going to try to sell me your reality again. You’re going to try to convince me to be unhappy.”

  “No, no,” Lydia cried out. “I want you to come to your senses and discover what true reality is.”

  “Your reality,” Lydia snapped. “I know all about that. I pay you to tell me
what’s real and I get unhappy and you get rich. I’ve had enough of that. You can call my world a fantasy if you like, but it’s where I want to live. Here, I decide what’s true and what’s beautiful. Not you, and not anyone else.”

  “Good for you,” cried Fred who had walked up behind Lydia.

  Lydia spun around.

  “How dare you,” she snapped. “This is my patient.”

  “Your nothing,” Marsha said. “I don’t belong to you. I’m my own person. I live my life and I make my decisions. And if I make a mistake, that’s no one’s business but mine. I know what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. I don’t care what you call reality.”

  “Right on,” one of the policemen called out.

  “I’m with her,” another chimed in.

  “You men keep quiet,” said their sergeant.

  All over the roof, a general unrest broke out. The ancient problem of authority versus freedom erupted, posed in its most pointed question: does a human being have the right to take his or her own life? It was made complex by the interlocking series of roles that were being played by doctor and policeman and therapist and would-be suicide. But in each of the minds of the people there, no matter how dimly, the essential issue of individual liberty was at stake.

  Suddenly, Lydia was confused. She felt she had an obligation to save Marsha’s life, but she knew no way to do that except by convincing the other woman that her current reality—dancing naked at the edge of the tallest building in New York City—was merely a fantasy and should be put aside.

  But for what? What was Lydia offering as an alternative? Some vague notion of what sanity and health were? She was sophisticated enough to know that a large part of her job was helping people to adjust to a world that was perhaps not fit to be adjusted to. Yet, everything she officially stood for, all that she had been trained for, told her that she must persevere in her way of doing things. Even though there was something in Marsha’s terrible beauty at that moment which told Lydia that the dancer had discovered some source of energy which might be forever closed to the logical mind of the therapist.

  “This is no time for me to be caught in an ambivalence of values,” Lydia told herself, and yet each attempt she made to speak to the other woman lacked conviction.

  “There’s no single reality,” Fred whispered. “The world is open-ended and infinite. Only our choices define what is real. And it is wrong to take anyone’s choice away from them.”

  Behind them, the policeman started his tune once more, the sad melody changing the mood of the night. The helicopter wavered and flew higher, then veered off to land at a further distance from the scene.

  “Don’t you see?” Marsha keened. “Don’t you see that I am happy now?”

  And with those words she ran the length of the rooftop, skipping, leaping, pirouetting, until she reached the far edge, and then with a leap that would have done credit to Nureyev, she jumped joyfully from the lip of the building.

  Everyone on the roof gasped, practically in unison, and after a split second ran to the spot from which the girl had leapt. When they reached the edge and looked down, she was still falling, circling, spinning, her arms and legs kicking lazily, as though she were sky diving. But there was no parachute, just a naked body, head and limbs and torso sailing through the air, hair blowing, ass clenching, cunt gaping.

  “And nothing and no one shall ever change this moment for me again,” was the last thought which went through Marsha’s mind as she hit the pavement and her body broke, and splattered, and flew into a hundred pieces, to finally return to the infinitesimal atoms from which it had been put together.

  2

  When the doorbell rang at ten o’clock the following morning, Lydia wasn’t sure she could handle what was coming. After Marsha’s leap into space, the entire crew that had been on the roof rushed down to see the result with that tingling admixture of fear and ghoulish curiosity which accompanies disasters. Lydia had been astonished to find that the sight was not as gory as she had expected. The fall was so great that Marsha’s body exploded upon impact and hardly any of it remained in any kind of coherent whole. Even the blood and guts was minimal.

  “It’s almost as though she disappeared,” Lydia had whispered to Fred.

  “She did disappear,” he told her. “She stepped off into a separate reality which we, from our granite viewpoints, might call a fantasy. I don’t doubt but that she still exists, somehow, somewhere.”

  “Why, I never expected you to be religiously sentimental,” she replied, amazed at her ability to make conversation. Then the walls of the building blurred before her eyes and she swooned into his arms.

  He had taken her to her apartment, run a hot bath for her, and when she was completely relaxed, lifted her out, dried her, and laid her gently on the bed. Then he massaged her muscles and tendons until she was as limp as a freshly killed carcass. Smiling to himself, Fred mounted her and entered her slowly, his cock as sensitive as a tongue, his steady, even movement not exciting her but rather filling her with a throbbing energy that imparted a sense of vitality without disturbing her drowsy state.

  “How odd,” she thought, “to be being fucked so shortly after I watched a woman leap to her death.”

  Fred had fucked her for well over an hour, in total silence, and from time to time she actually dozed off, soaring into delicious dreams of flying, and then descending to consciousness, only to find that the man above her was still invading the deepest recesses of her body with insidious sensuous awareness.

  Neither of them approached the slightest intimation of orgasm, and finally he picked her up and rolled her onto her side. For a long time he lay next to her, and they did nothing but breathe deeply and sink more comfortably into the mattress, soaking up the sweet caress of gravity. Then he slid slowly up toward the headboard until his crotch was level with her eyes. His cock was erect again. Her lips fell open naturally and he moved into her without tension. He filled her the way a mother’s breast fills a baby’s mouth. And she sucked him in precisely that way, gently, lovingly, sleepily, almost absentmindedly. He put his hands on the back of her head but didn’t need to guide her, for she was following an instinctual rhythm that had more intelligence than either of their mechanical minds might ever muster.

  When he came, the cream spurted onto her tongue and she swallowed his nectar succulently, allowing it to trickle out and over her lips. She was already asleep as the last drops oozed down her throat.

  But the following morning crashed in upon her with as much jittery confusion as the night before had produced solace. Fred had already left and she lay alone in bed, the alarm buzzing nastily. It was a quarter to nine and her first patient was due at ten. She rose, went to shower, and shook her head when for a few seconds she couldn’t open her lips. They were glued together with dried sperm. By nine fifteen she was getting breakfast together, and when the doorbell rang she had just put the finishing touches on her makeup.

  Her patient was Mrs. Nora Norwood, a thirty-six year old housewife who had come to her with a standard marriage complaint several months earlier. For more than a year she had not experienced orgasms with her husband. The first four years of their marriage, she reported, had been idyllic, and they had carried on like newlyweds almost all the time, except for those periods when the normal load of emotional problems and other pressures put them off their feed. But then, gradually, she had noticed a falling off of desire. She didn’t love her husband any less; if anything, she cared for him more. And their sex life had not deteriorated; they remained imaginative and inventive. But somehow, a certain element of passion had evaporated. What Mrs. Norwood called “the magic” had dissipated before her very eyes.

  There are many explanations as to why these things happen. The most pessimistic states simply that the flow of energy which provides the juice between two people dries up because the constant repetition of the same smells and textures and move
ments creates a state of boredom in the brain. Thus, while intercourse becomes more dimensional and human, it loses the edge of raw desire which activates the more primitive and exciting centers. Another possibility is that the pure erotic drive is overlaid with ancillary concerns having to do with running a household, raising children, and so forth. Also, hidden resistances and rigidities, unnoticed during the first flushes of erotic involvement, begin to make themselves felt and take prominence; that is, the neurotic personality overcomes the early attempts at putting on one’s best possible manner.

  Lydia took the first four or five sessions to test the most obvious possibilities. It was clear from the first that Mrs. Norwood was not frigid. Nor was there any major psychological malfunction. The factors of boredom, routine, staleness were present, but did not provide sufficient explanation for the inability to attain orgasm. At the end of the second month, Lydia took the case to Doctor Monroe, her control therapist.

  The old man had listened gravely, thought for a long time, and then asked, “What about masturbation?”

  “She doesn’t,” Lydia told him.

  “That might open a few locks,” he replied. And had refused to comment further.

  Now, Lydia opened the door and ushered Nora Norwood in. As always, she was taken with the woman’s freshness and glowing exuberance. She had no children, and since her husband was a highly paid executive, she spent most of her day lolling about the house, or going to yoga and dance classes and immersing herself in the bowels of beauty salons. She had a maid to shop and clean, and except for her inability to make that small connection which climaxes the sex act with a series of convulsive shudders, she did not have a problem in the world.

  She was a bit more than five and a half feet tall, with close-cropped, jet black hair. Her cream-white skin did not have, nor did it need, a trace of makeup. She wore a transparent white blouse which almost totally revealed her slightly overlarge breasts, and a pleated black skirt which, on any other woman would have appeared unfashionable. But Mrs. Norwood’s style was such that she could carry clothes few others would consider wearing, and make her outfits appear ultra chic.