In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  Through all of it she did not move. Her legs were lifted and parted and brought back together and manipulated in a hundred ways, but she exerted no effort. She allowed herself to be dead, the greatest luxury available to a human being.

  The scene reached its own high point and then began to slacken, to falter. The men were the first to drop off, each having attained from two to five orgasms in her or on her. And then the women, one by one, stopped licking and finger fucking and smothering her face with their buttocks. And finally, they were all lying on the floor, some asleep, most in a tingling trance, and Lydia lay stunned and glimmering on the table. She was beyond all ability to give any name to her state of being at that moment.

  At dawn, there was a stirring. The family began to move itself out of its collective stupor, a deep unconsciousness in which the most central aspects of the self were regenerated. And, something they were not to understand in all its implications until later, an unbreakable bond of understanding was formed. The way in which they had joined the relationship between fantasy and reality made it impossible that they could become anything but a permanent family.

  It was John Abbot who cut Lydia loose. It took a half hour for her to get her full circulation back. And when she sat up, the entire universe tilted. She grabbed on to the edge of the table for she had started to float off its surface.

  She shot John a glance to see whether he had noticed.

  “Well, all the old books and the heavy yogis tell us that when you really understand reality, you become less and less subject to its laws. Levitation isn’t that big a deal, unless you make a sideshow out of it.”

  “No,” Lydia said, and then cleared her throat which was clogged with dried sperm. “I just don’t want to start floating when I’m walking down Forty-second street, that’s all.”

  “Well, the only solution to that is to get away from Forty-second street.”

  “You mean leave the city?”

  “Sure,” John said, “We all know that we have to go find our own land sooner or later.”

  “It’s too much for me to think about right now.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked, “I mean aside from ravished and spaced.”

  “I’m hungry,” she told him. “And I want a bath.”

  John turned around.

  “Nora,” he whispered. “Why don’t you rustle these bums off the floor and see if we can get a breakfast together.”

  Then he turned back, slipped his arms under Lydia’s knees and behind her shoulders, and lifted her from the table.

  “I’m going to take you in and give you a bath,” he said. “And then we’ll all eat together, and figure out what happens next.”

  9

  Lydia could not remember the last time she’d been in a basement. Of course, at the Warren Handman Institute for Psychoanalytic Systems (WHIPS), the place was not referred to as the basement. The members of that august body had shown a rare flash of humor by nicknaming it “the id” since it lay below the rest of the building’s functions.

  She sat on one side of a long redwood table while the five man panel examining her ranged across the opposite edge. The entire scene had been mounted with the precision of a Polanski period piece film. Six onyx ashtrays, six pads, six perfectly sharpened pencils, six glasses, and a pitcher of ice water provided the essential props. The massive tables and carved chairs with their velour cushions yielded the major furniture. On one wall an enlarged photograph of Freud peered down with a sour expression. Facing him, Warren Handman, the founder of the clinic, took the second place to the master he had assumed even in life, now represented by a slightly smaller photo in a less ornate frame. There was one window, but ventilation was provided by a discreet air conditioner which hummed to itself in one corner where it took the stale air out of a back alley and sent it, chastened, into the tribunal room.

  Tom Norwood had followed through on his threat, writing a letter to the New York State Licensing Bureau outlining Lydia’s activities and demanding her designation as a therapist be rescinded. The Board maintained a list of titles which citizens could not assume without official approval, such as Medical Doctor, Psychiatrist, Attorney at Law, and Psychologist. However, the term “therapist” was not on their list, and so anyone from a highly experienced physician to a raging lunatic could advertise himself or herself as a therapist. Tom Norwood hadn’t known that and his letter was at first dismissed, but the clerk who read it, titillated by the juicy details of the way he had been taken through his fantasy and ended by fucking Lydia in the mouth, passed it around her office where it finally made its way into the hands of a woman who took her job as guardian of the public nomenclature quite seriously. She looked up Lydia’s name, saw that she had passed the Licensing Exam for the title of psychologist, and forwarded the letter to the office which handled complaints against the abuse of that license.

  Like all bureaucracies, the Board disliked involving itself in anything which wasn’t routine and had perfected its own version of the process of passing the buck. Through a series of letters and phone calls, they arranged for the Handman Clinic to act as their investigative agent to decide whether Lydia had indeed overstepped her bounds in experimenting with radical forms of practice.

  When Doctor Zugzwang was informed of what was going on, he literally did a little dance of delight, much like the skip executed by Hitler at the Austrian border. For months he had been receiving word-of-mouth reports on Lydia and growing more and more furious. His deepest rage involved what he considered to be the bastardization of analysis by generations of pipsqueaks who seized on one small corner of the vast Freudian tapestry and capitalized on selling strands of useless rationalizations. He would have dropped a small nuclear device on Esalen if he could have gotten away with it. He despised the touchie-feelie therapists, the sex therapists, the ones who experimented with drugs. He was capable, in his more expansive moments, of having a conversation with a very, very serious Jungian, but Reichians, Rogerians, Sullivanians, Behaviorists, and members of all other schools were anathema. His basic attitude was Inquisitorial. The world seethed with heretics, and it would be a better place once they were flushed out, forced to recant, or else be burned at the stake.

  And now, one of the most dangerous and fiendish of them all had been delivered right into his hands! When he received the news he was beside himself with glee. If he could conduct a truly definitive investigation he might not merely wipe Lydia Stone off the therapeutic map, but institute guidelines that would be used to judge all future psychologists who wanted to tread the sacred ground of analysis. If he had his way, only medical doctors would even be considered, but he was realistic enough to know that the day of the lay analyst had definitely arrived. Ultimately, he would have it that no one could be an analyst without studying at the Handman clinic, under his supervision, which derived directly from Freud.

  Zugzwang simmered even when he thought of his fellow Freudians who were filled with tales about how the old man had written to them, or held long conversations with them. The worst were those who had been analyzed by the Master. For Zugzwang knew, with the certainty of a suspicious husband who is convinced his wife is having an affair. He knew in his heart that the real transmission had been made to him. During a session of the International Psychoanalytic Association where Freud had addressed two thousand members, after the Founder had walked from the lectern and out of the hall, he passed Zugzwang on the steps, stopped, reached over and tugged his beard, and said in a loud voice, “Don’t take yourself so seriously, Zugzwang.” The then junior analyst understood the message at once. Freud was saying, “To all the others I give the outer shell, the mere form. But you and I understand the true, the central meaning. So much so that I can joke with you.” It was the seal of esoteric knowledge, and Zugzwang had guarded it jealously for forty years.

  To fill out the panel he had chosen Doctors Schaatz, Fick, Zwischen and von Gule. Not one of t
hem was under sixty-five, and they all spoke with carefully nurtured accents which protected them from the rhythms of either their native or acquired tongues. Zugzwang had no need to tell the men what he expected, for they shared his cold anger at what they saw as the debasement of a noble ideal. Like clucking bishops, they were prepared to raise their miters in condemnation of the hussy who dared drag the legacy of Freud into the mud.

  Lydia hadn’t known quite how to meet them. The first problem was dress. Should she wear something straightforward and treat the entire episode on the level of consensual reality, or ought she to approach the question of clothing with the attitude of emptiness and throw on whatever her hands reached for first in the morning? The family urged her not to go at all.

  “What’s the point?” Judy Bachrach said, “they’re going to hang you anyway, unless you grovel and promise to mend your ways. So let them take your license away by mail. Why give them the satisfaction of doing it in person?”

  “Unless you’re thinking of giving in to them,” John Abbot added.

  “Of course not,” Lydia replied. “But it’s like the old witches’ notion of looking up the devil’s asshole. Zugzwang is the personification of everything that’s horrible about the therapeutic world. Not for what he does, because classic analysis has its own validity in its own context. But because he can’t allow anyone else to find their own way. He’s the worst kind of fascist, ready to impose conformity on the entire species. And I suppose I want to confront him, to taste him. I think it will make me stronger.”

  By that time the group had decided that leaving for the country was only a question of money and momentum. It had become clear that all the arguments forced them in that direction. From Fred’s accusation that their continuing to live in the city made them nothing more than a fancy brand of parasite to their own awareness that they would blossom best in a place where they weren’t constantly being pressed in by a crush of people, the pressure was on them to leave. That being the case, Lydia’s holding onto a New York State Psychologist’s License was purely beside the point. If they didn’t take it away from her she would let it lapse anyway. The question now was how to get the most mileage out of the situation.

  They spent an hour tripping out on all the possibilities before they stripped Lydia naked, led her into the bedroom, and tried on every possible combination of clothing they could. The appointment was for two in the afternoon so they started dressing her at ten in the morning. Still, what with the giggling and fucking and horsing around, it was one-thirty before she was ready to leave, and she was sitting in the taxi before she realized that her outfit was outrageous beyond description for the meeting she was about to have.

  Zugzwang had been dismayed when he first saw her, for she was wearing her mink and exuded an air of complete composure and self-confidence. He was prepared for a struggle with her, but was slightly fearful that she might have a few tricks prepared to catch him off balance. But when she removed the coat, his jaw fell open and he stared at her like an idiot gaping at the sun. Lydia was wearing a skin-tight blazing red knitted blouse two sizes too small which gripped every edge and curve of her torso with as much accuracy as a coat of paint. Her breasts were more naked than if she had worn nothing at all. Below the blouse was a pair of jet-black hotpants, cut well below her navel and molded in perfect contours around her pubic bone, revealing the cuntal bulge and split which did not carry the benefit of protection by panties. Her arms and legs were bare, and when she kicked off her mules she strode into the room barefoot. By the time she stood in front of the table she looked like nothing so much as an Eighth Avenue hooker on a summer night, except that she wore no jewelry and no makeup.

  “Hello boys,” she drawled, “how’s tricks?”

  Zugzwang almost bit his tongue. The woman had come into the very bowels of the Freudian body dressed and acting in such a way as to boast of her mockery of everything he stood for. At the same time, the sheer erotic power of her transfixed him and he felt something he had not known for more than twenty years, a distinct throb beginning in his right thigh and pulsing into his now finally dormant cock. The other men in the room shuffled about on their chairs, looking to Zugzwang for clues as to how to react. But he was struck dumb, leaning forward over the table, his eyes bulging.

  Lydia laughed out loud, the chuckle of a whore watching a portly judge trip over his shoelaces in his haste to get to her.

  “What’s the matter, Zugzwang,” she said in a nasal twang, “never see a libido walking before?” The clanging of that word in the context of having Lydia’s raw cunty eroticism flung in his face, caused a jamming in the analyst’s mind. The doctor possessed something like the Catholic’s reflex of nodding the head upon hearing the name Jesus; only with him the action was not physically manifest and was connected to the long litany of terms which constitute the Freudian orthodoxy. But by that irony in which history delights, Zugzwang’s reaction to Lydia was precisely the same as those doctors who first listened to Freud read his ideas on infantile sexuality. The brooding Viennese neurologist, fired up on cocaine, was greeted with hoots and catcalls and even had several chairs flung through the air at him. Now the nearly bald Zugzwang had to exert every bit of his will power to keep from picking up the heavy ashtray in front of him and crushing Lydia’s skull with it.

  “Please, Doctor, please sit down,” said Zwischen. The clinic’s leader looked as though he were on the brink of a heart seizure. No one could guess the depth of his murderous rage.

  Zugzwang finally relaxed and eased himself into his chair. Lydia remained standing for a few seconds longer, gazing down on the assemblage of analytic inquisitors and, licking her lips and shaking her tits, she smiled to herself and sat down.

  The six of them let the silence build around them for almost a full minute. Lydia and Zugzwang watched each other like gunfighters about to draw. She was the first to break the eyelock, and then raked the others with her amused glance.

  “Well gents,” she said, “the worst thing you can do is to recommend that I have my license revoked. And since it has less value to me than a sheet of high-grade toilet paper, your power covers a very limited area indeed. That is to say, the worst you can do is give me a pain in the ass for a brief time. So let’s cut the pseudo-solemnities and talk straight.”

  The minute she spoke, a hundred cobwebs caught flame in her mind and burned away in an instant. Like a little child who has been naughty and who fears the wrath of her father, Lydia had retained a residual awe of the possible power of the men she was to meet But once the words were out of her mouth, once she stood before them in her cataclysmic costume and hurled her challenge at them, she saw them as five pathetic creatures who lived in a dungeon of their own limitations. It wasn’t until that instant that she saw that she had unconsciously been fearing this confrontation, that her dressing up was a bit of bravura intended to reassure herself more than to impress her accusers. It was the old father-figure problem that had hung her up on Doctor Monroe and the entire world of official attitudes. She almost laughed in relief at seeing, truly seeing, that these men had no power over her. They could strip her of her accreditation, smear her reputation in the therapeutic community, but all that had as much punch as an excommunication order issued by the Pope. She knew who these people were, for she had been one of them herself. They were the most clever of the intellectuals who grew fat on the offal of the civilization they fed off. They were incapable of independent thought, of free action. They accepted what they were told in school, and put curlicues on it, enough to make them seem mentally active, but their contribution to true knowledge was about as meaningful as the addition of fins on the bumpers of cars.

  “All right,” said Doctor Zugzwang, clearing his throat, composing himself. “Although, judging from your brazen attitude and absolutely infantile appearance, appearance . . . appear . . . “ A tic had developed at the corner of his mouth and his head shook violently for a few seconds.
Doctor von Gule leaned over and pounded his colleague on the back.

  “Appearance,” Zugzwang continued, “you are obviously already resigned to being dismissed from the community of your peers.”

  “Excuse me,” Lydia said, “my former peers.”

  “As you like. At any rate, this hearing will probably not take very much time since you are not interested in making a defense.”

  “A defense?” Lydia asked. “I’m not aware of what charges have been brought against me.”

  Zugzwang looked down at the pad in front of him and smiled.

  “Well, let’s see,” he said, “where shall we begin? The list is rather formidable. Using therapeutic procedures to seduce patients. Condoning illicit and immoral behavior. Holding orgies under the auspices of group therapy. Suspicious circumstances regarding the death of your control therapist, Doctor Monroe.’ He turned to speak to his colleagues. “Minute traces of vaginal secretions were found at the base of Doctor Monroe’s pe-pe-pe-penis.” Then, turning back to Lydia. “Evidence of misconduct concerning the suicide of Marsha Seligson, a former patient of yours.”

  Doctor Zugzwang leaned back in his chair. “Quite a track record, Doctor Stone,” he said, infusing the title with venomous sarcasm.

  On an impulse, Lydia decided to cut through the rigmarole to see if she could address what little flexibility remained in the old man. This labored jousting wasn’t even amusing, and she thought she might see if there was any value to be found in the meeting.

  “All right, Zugzwang, let’s drop the bullshit and talk about what’s really important. And that is whether therapists have a responsibility to explore new ways of feeding life or whether we have to stay mired in the stale old rituals.”