by Marco Vassi
Lydia closed the door behind her and walked after her patient as she went into the office where therapy was ordinarily done. It was appointed in classic non-intrusive style, with beige walls, a brown rug, two Eames chairs, and a low coffee table.
Lydia’s basic approach had been low keyed. She did little more than act as a sounding board for the patient’s feelings. The theoretical underpinning held that the individual had the solution to his or her own problems within the self and required only to exteriorize the condition for the confusions to become clarified. It was a technique which, as with all others, could be powerfully effective in the hands of a skilled practitioner and a parody in the hands of a nuts-and-bolts therapist. In the trade, the following story had gained currency as a wry comment on the approach.
A patient walks in and tells the therapist that he feels like jumping out a window. The therapist says, “Ah, you feel like jumping out a window . . . “ The patient then says that he is going to kill himself. The therapist nods with empathy and says, “Ah, you feel like you are going to kill yourself.” Whereupon the patient takes a running leap and hurls himself out the window. The therapist walks over, looks down to the sidewalk, and says, “Ah, splat.”
Lydia had worked in that manner for a few years before she came under the influence of a Reichian who had convinced her that no progress toward health could be made unless the tensions which are locked into the muscles were directly attacked. This led to a year of experimentation with psychophysical techniques and finally culminated in an approach whereby Lydia synthesized several classical methods.
It was while she was deeply into exploring that approach that Lydia had met Fred and his first reaction had been to mock what she was doing.
“It’s all so formal,” he told her. “Instead, take a housewife, give her a Valium and a glass of Scotch, and plunk her down in an easy chair in front of the tube, and then feed the collective fantasies of the nation directly into her subconscious. It’s cheaper, easier, and free of all the rigmarole you indulge in. Soap operas are much more honest than therapy, because they don’t pretend that each individual’s tacky little melodrama has any more value than being merely an idiosyncratic manifestation of the national mentality at any given time. The soap opera provides precisely what your therapy does: catharsis.”
“But what about integration?” Lydia argued.
“Does it make people relate their fantasies to their reality in such a way that they change?”
“Nobody changes,” Fred sneered. “Sometimes we feel better, sometimes we feel worse. Sometimes we get ideas that we’re going somewhere, and most of the time we realize that life is just a march to the grave. Therapy is a lie because it promises something that can’t be given.”
Fred’s ideas had unsettled her, but there was nothing she could do but continue as she was, trying to find meaning in her work, even though, in her most honest moments she had to admit that all her therapeutic expertise really seemed to have no effect on anyone’s life at all.
Nora Norwood kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned the top of her blouse, and lay down on the thick rug, assuming the position with which Lydia began her sessions. It was common practice for her to let her patients lie still for five minutes, to collect themselves, before beginning to bring them into a state of heightened body awareness. But Nora noticed something different about Lydia’s mood this morning and she sat up.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I had something terrible happen last night,” Lydia said. “A patient of mine committed suicide.”
Nora brought her hand over her mouth.
“That girl that jumped from the World Trade Center building? The one on the front page this morning?”
Lydia nodded.
“Oh, how terrible,” Nora said. And then, seeing the look on Lydia’s face, added, “I hope you’re not blaming yourself.”
“Well, what if you went home this afternoon and slit your wrists after spending an hour telling me how unhappy you were. Of course, in a sense there is nothing I could hold myself responsible for, but on another level, I would wonder if there was anything I might have done, or said.”
Nora lay back down. “My problem isn’t all that serious,” she said.
“Neither was Marsha’s,” Lydia told her.
“What was it?”
“She couldn’t find any meaning in her life.”
“And you think that’s not serious?”
“It’s nothing that doesn’t afflict all of us. Even you. Your lack of orgasms isn’t anything more than an inability to make a connection with yourself at a deeper level.”
“Whew,” Nora replied, “that’s quite an interpretative leap.”
“Well, let’s see,” Lydia told her. “Let’s do something about getting you an orgasm and discover what it is that you uncover along the way.”
Nora lifted an eyebrow and shot an edgy glance at Lydia. “Just what do you mean, doing something about getting me an orgasm?”
“When’s the last time you masturbated?”
“Oh, good Lord, when I was fifteen, I think.” Nora smiled. “Then I discovered that men served the same purpose but with a great deal more scope.”
“Perhaps now that you are temporarily blocked in relation to what a man can do for you, you might try to rediscover your capacity to give yourself what your husband can’t.”
“Really!” Nora exclaimed, her voice registering mock shock.
“Really,” Lydia replied. “What do you have to lose?”
Before Nora could respond, Lydia began the ritual of getting the other woman relaxed.
“Uncross your ankles,” she said, “and put your arms out at your sides. Now, roll your head from side to side and release some of the tension in your neck. Close your eyes so that your attention gets focused inside your body. We’ve done this enough times so that you can do most of the work yourself; just let my voice help you along.”
Nora let out a long sigh and her entire frame visibly relaxed. “It’s extraordinary,” she said, “no matter how often I do this, during the intervening week I always forget how incredibly delicious it is just to let go.”
“You should do this for yourself at home,” Lydia went on, “but let’s not get distracted by talk. Keep the sense of opening going on. And begin to get into your breathing. Not just the actual breath which enters your nostrils, moves down your throat, fills your lungs, pushes your diaphragm and swells your belly, but the sense of breath that seeps into your shoulders and arms and legs, the feeling of life-giving energy which floods your whole body.”
Lydia watched for several minutes as Nora sank more and more deeply into a trance, and when she gauged that the other woman was totally receptive, she went on, “Find some spot in your body that calls attention to itself, some sensation, and let that grow and develop. Let it move through you until it reaches the point where you can give it a name, and then let that name blossom until it flowers into a fantasy. And when the picture is firmly fixed, let me know what it is that’s happening.”
Nora’s frame shuddered, she took a deep sigh, and then began to speak. “It’s the same,” she said, “I am lying naked in a strange hotel room. A man I’ve never seen before is standing over me, his face contorted by a kind of evil desire. He’s actually gloating. He leans forward and pinches my nipples with his fingernails. It’s painful, but still bearable. The sensation makes me squirm. I am twisting and writhing on the bed. I know that my legs are kicking and parting and he can see my cunt. I know that my cunt is spreading wide and he is peering down into the center of me. He pinches harder and I start to moan. He whispers all sorts of vile thing in my ear.”
“What things? Say them.”
“ ‘Slut, cunt, whore, bitch, tramp,’ “
As Nora recited the litany, Lydia smiled, something Nora could not see. It always amazed Lydia that the moments of
greatest shameful eroticism produced the most banal vocabulary.
“ ‘You hot hole, you slimy twat, you piece of ass . . . ‘ “ Nora went on. “ ‘You love it, don’t you? You love having strange men shove their hands up your snatch and put their pricks in your mouth, don’t you?’ “
“Answer him,” Lydia prompted. “Let yourself say whatever comes to your lips.”
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” Nora chanted over and over again. As she said the word her body began to move in a new way. Now she was pumping her pelvis into the air, twisting her thighs, and her hands had moved up to grasp her breasts.
“What’s happening now?” Lydia asked.
“The scene’s changed,” Nora told her. “I’ve been picked up by a taxi driver, a huge, burly, greasy man with thick lips and calloused hands. He takes me to his garage where he parks his cab. He pulls me out and throws me over the fender of the car, face downward. Then he hikes up my skirt and pulls my panties down. My ass is completely exposed. Behind him are a dozen more men, all like him, fat, ugly, sweating, chewing cigars, licking their lips, their eyes blazing with smoldering depravity. And I am so clean, so tender, so fragile. They can’t believe they have such a prize in front of them. A sensitive wealthy lady who has let all her cunty animality break through. My legs are kicking in the air, my mouth is crying for cock, my tits are crushed against the hard metal. The first man enters me brutally and after a few harsh jabs he fills my precious cunt with his hateful fluid. And when he is through, the others come on, endlessly, shoving their cocks in my cunt, in my ass, in my mouth. Their sperm is coating me, their hands are tearing at me, and I’m . . . I’m . . . “
“What?” Lydia urged, “What?”
Abruptly, Nora rolled over onto her stomach, taking in actual physical reality the posture she had assumed in her fantasy. Her hands now went between her thighs, pulling up her skirt. Finally, they reached bare flesh and her fingers slipped beneath the edges of her panties and slid into her juicy cunt. Lydia watched as Nora twitched on the rug, her ass contracting, her mouth opening and closing.
“Yes,” Lydia urged, “Do it, do it!”
Nora cupped her cunt and ground the palms of her hands against her clitoris. “They’re fucking me, fucking me . . . “ she groaned as she ground her pubic bone down into her own flesh and caught that elusive spark of electricity which triggers orgasm. Then, as Lydia watched, Nora climaxed before her eyes, shamelessly finger-fucking herself to conclusion.
There was a long, long silence in the room. Finally, slowly, Nora rolled over, and looked up at Lydia. Her face was flushed and open, her eyes sparkling.
“My God,” she whispered, “what have I done? I’ve let you watch me masturbate.”
“So you have,” Lydia replied, and noticed that she was breathing hard, and experiencing a familiar warmth and moistness between her own thighs. “But don’t be too upset. It’s a first for me too. After all these years of sharing people’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, this is the first time I’ve ever been this naked with anyone.”
A deep musky scent of female secretion pervaded the room and both women noticed it at once. They looked at one another, glanced momentarily away, and then looked back, smiling warmly and somewhat sheepishly.
Then, in an action that shocked the therapist more than it did the patient, Lydia cupped the other woman’s chin in her hand, pulled her face toward her, and kissed her tenderly on the lips.
“There,” Lydia said, “I’ve done something shocking too. Now, let’s talk about what happened and see if we can make some sense of it all.” The two women went into Lydia’s kitchen where they sat over coffee and cigarettes and tried to sort out the morning’s events.
“I want to steer us away from the sensationalistic aspects of what happened,” Lydia said, “although believe me I found the experience as exciting as you did, including the definite lesbian overtones to my reaction. But our task is to try to link your failure to attain orgasm with your husband to the material we unearthed today. Do you have any openers?”
“Yes,” Nora replied, blowing out a cloud of blue smoke. “The degradation aspect. I suppose I’m as well versed in the women’s liberation literature as anyone, and the degradation theme is one that men have imposed on us for some time. What puzzles me is why I seem to go straight to that to find excitement.”
“What about you and your husband? Do you get into any of that at all?”
“Oh, just the usual married stuff. He spanks me sometimes, and pisses on me in the shower, but it’s all so . . . normal, if you know what I mean. The actions themselves are not important; the crucial element is doing it with a man who despises me, or rather, despises my womanhood.”
“Have you had any actual experiences along those lines?”
Nora shook her head. “I lost my virginity to my college sweetheart. I fucked one other man before meeting Ralph, my husband. And that’s about it. And I don’t think I’m repressing anything. I enjoy straightforward, loving sex. Then why does this other stuff excite me so? This isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of fantasy, you know.”
Lydia remembered. The first time she had taken Nora on a fantasy trip she had been surprised to find the well-groomed woman rolling around the floor screaming like a cat in heat, having visions of being gang-banged by an entire football team. She had explained it to Nora in rather classical terms. “Nothing to be alarmed about,” she had said. She advised attempting to integrate her breathing exercises with her fantasies and bring that to the fucking she did with her husband as a means of snaring the elusive orgasm. But over a period of time it became apparent that it was not a question of bringing two separate modalities together, but one of choosing one over the other. Today’s experience had driven a wedge into Nora’s psyche.
“I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you,” Lydia replied at last. “I think we’re dealing with dynamics which transcend our usual categories of thinking.”
Nora nodded. “It’s as though the fantasy is exerting a pull far stronger than anything reality has to offer. I mean, I know that I’m supposed to consider warm and adult sex with my husband as the mature means of expression my eroticism and that the rest of this stuff is just neurotic underlay that has to be gotten through. But in a strange way, I feel that diving into my fantasies, especially with the energy I build up from masturbating, is offering me a real alternative, something to rival what I might have from conventional sex.
Lydia massaged her forehead with her right hand. “I think that’s what Marsha discovered last night. She saw that the world of so-called reality is nothing but a prejudice which has been handed down to us by our society, and that beyond that bubble of perception is an infinite and mysterious universe of possibilities which we can step into any time we want to. The only trouble is that that discovery destroyed her.”
Nora shuddered. “And me? Do you think it could destroy me?”
“I doubt, it. But it might end your marriage. At least, it might end the marriage you now conceive of. You might have to bring Ralph into this area of knowledge and see if you can find some way to share that journey into the unknown.”
“I have a suspicion that that’s a place one can only go alone,” Nora said.
“You may be right. But at least we can hold one another’s hand. We can do that much for one another. Maybe that’s all we can do.” She paused, lit another cigarette, and went on. “But the thing is not to get trapped in the fantasy. You see, I’m sure that the fantasy is just another false perception. And while it may be the doorway into the infinite, it would be foolish for us to get trapped in that doorway. What we did today gave an indication of what’s possible. But it’s only the beginning.” She looked up at Nora and smiled ruefully. “That is, if you want to continue.”
Nora reached out and stroked Lydia’s cheek. “Just try and stop me,” she said.
“As
far as the degradation business is concerned,” Lydia continued, “I wouldn’t make too big an issue out of that. I suspect that our fantasies will shape themselves around whatever socially conditioned myth we happen to be carrying around with us.”
Nora shook her head and sighed.
“Nobody ever told me therapy would be like this,” she said.
Lydia didn’t answer for a few seconds and when she did her voice was serious. “It isn’t. I think what we’re doing is the first step beyond therapy. I think we have begun to enter the realm of magic.”
3
Her body had become the music. Blood, bones, skin, hair, lost all definition as parts of a physical whole and were transformed into variations of rhythmic, raucous sound. The ordinary dulled distinction between inner and outer worlds evaporated in the heat of the insistent, dogmatic rock which left no choice but for whoever became susceptible to its spell to abandon the daily dualism of thought-ridden existence. The universe was experienced as the meaning of the word used to describe it . . . uni-verse: one turn, one twist, one idea, one poem. Cutting through the music itself, the dimly discernable lyrics slashed at the tendons of the mind, reducing the conditioned patterns of the brain to conceptual porridge. They took all the pious and opaque hypocrisies of civilization and set them happily on fire. Lydia, now at once animal and angel, was driven into a frenzy of jungle lust which was indistinguishable from the purest meditative perception.
She was drunk and stoned. She was high on abandon. She was surrounded by more than three hundred people, all bound together in a mounting orgiastic frenzy. Many of them were naked, most in outlandish costumes, capes, scraps of organdy, face and body paint, leather jock straps. Lydia herself had nothing left on but her jeans. Her shoes had been flung off an hour earlier, and when her blouse had become so drenched with sweat that it was plastered to her skin, she had ripped that off also.