Michel fell back into his chair with a sigh of exhaustion and contemplated the now rather long message he had composed so far unsure of what it amounted to. There was not much sense of direction and he still wasn’t quite sure what his true motivations were. He wanted to say goodbye, of course, but more than that. He wanted to apologize without apologizing, to apologize for having to leave which was not his fault and for choosing to leave her, which while indeed his choice, was in his mind the only reasonable course of action. He wanted to tell her how he felt, about her, about leaving her, about loosing her… He wanted to beg her not to hate him, plead with her to forgive whatever faults she might think his. He wanted absolution.
“I am shutting down this email account as of tomorrow since I will no longer be maintaining my music website. I will check my messages one last time before I do so, around noon my time, before we leave for the airport. My wife does her best to hide her joy at our return, just as I try to hide my sadness. It is easier for me given the grief factor. But I am rambling now for lack of courage. I wish you happiness and above all pleasure. I wish you to always find what you seek and much more. You are and will always remain my muse and I know now that my quest has ended, just as I know that there shall never be another woman in my life.
Dare I hope that you will not hate me?
Yours truly, always…
Michel”
As he promised, he checked his account one last time and found her last reply. “Leave me if you must, I hate you not.
Yours still
Catherine”
And Michel wept as Titus perhaps once had.
Her end The first emotion after making the decision was a great sense of relief and this surprised Catherine quite a bit. She’d gotten up in a good mood, as she had the last few days. After her husband had left she’d lazily gone up to the room to finish her coffee and surf the news sites as was her habit before leaving for work herself a few minutes later, and now she wondered as she had for the last three days if she would write an e-‐mail, deciding once again not to. But just as she was going to get ready to leave, a simple question came to her mind and the lack of an immediate response was like a jolt to her, followed by an epiphany-‐like sensation and then… relief. Simply put, she didn’t know who’s turn it was and when the thought formed that maybe it was nobody’s turn, in the blink of an eye it was over, and she was smiling as she walked out the door. “It’s my turn” she thought to herself as she got in the bus, “one last time.” These three words echoed in her mind all during the bus ride and by the time she got off and walked the block and a half to her office she knew that tomorrow would be the first day of a changed life, one more simple, less encumbered.
Her day had an odd configuration as she was taking the afternoon off from work to compensate for having aided her boss in hosting an event at city hall the previous Sunday, and she had scheduled for the afternoon an appointment with her therapist followed by a massage, something she indulged in perhaps once a month. The massage had marked the starting point and the endpoint of her affair but as striking as that may seem, if there was any meaning in this, anything beyond a pure coincidence, then she failed to discern it. The morning went well and the now apparent success of the event she had hosted earned her some collateral compliments from her boss which she handled with grace, however unaccustomed she may have been to such circumstances. By the time she left the office she was very relaxed and happy, feeling very much alive, feeling as if a quest had ended in success with a prize worthy of the risks involved. This must be akin, she thought, to the feeling a con artist would get after pulling off her final caper, now finally having enough to lead a straight life, the joyous end to a long chapter. For indeed Catherine knew that there would be no more men in her life, no more affairs and that this final story in its own way had fulfilled her, made her whole, given her that little je ne sais quoi she had been longing for. What was that Heart lyric again? Oh yes… “And what he couldn’t give me was the one little thing that you can”. A spark, a flame, passion, lust… what had it been? She wasn’t sure and in a way it did not really matter anymore if it ever had, since the result alone was what truly mattered: she no longer felt that she had missed something or that something was missing from her life, and having put her finger on it she now understood the feeling of relief. She had a light salad for lunch and headed to her appointment with her therapist.
To say that the affair had changed her would somehow imply that there had been something passive about her participation in it which would be laughable, but among the things that she had learned was that she no longer felt a need for everything to have a reason, a justification that could be rationalized into a convincing argument if need be, and this left her free to ponder her actions and their origins without a burden of proof concerning her motivations. This newfound serendipity allowed her to feel good about where she was, to be very much alive. Tracing the familiar steps to Dr. Bentsen’s office, it felt to her as if knowing that this was the last time made everything look new and different, the narrow lobby and its rickety elevator, the musty hallway leading to the office. He sat as always at the small desk in the antechamber, writing what she had always assumed were notes on the previous occupant of the couch, and remarked after a warm greeting on how well she looked today, but as he began to usher her to the office itself, she went no further and smiled.
“Actually, I just came to say goodbye, and of course to give you a check for this session.”
“You’re stopping therapy?” he asked quite taken aback at first but quickly regaining composure. “May I ask why?” he continued with a smile.
“I think that we’ve accomplished what I wanted me to accomplish.”
“Really?” She heard the slight tone of incredulousness that wafted through the words. “That’s wonderful.”
“You seem surprised, doctor.” She hoped that her own tone did not betray the amusement that she felt at this moment. “I guess I wasn’t fully aware of the progress that you were making.”
“I’ve come a long way over the last four years, Dr Bentsen.”
“Has it been that long?” The sweet bespectacled octogenarian’s fondness for her was evident in his smile. “And you still don’t call me Michael…”
“Do you ask all patients to use your first name?” “No, not at all. In fact it’s fairly rare, but with you I somehow felt that it was appropriate. You came here for answers, not help, and that is not the most usual circumstance, so I thought that a certain rapprochement could allow us to delve more substantively into the issues that concerned you, perhaps putting us side-‐by-‐ side rather than face-‐to-‐face. Did you feel that this was coercive on my part?” “Not at all. It just felt more natural to me to address you with a title. Always the Catholic girl, full of respect for authority figures.”
She chatted with him another few minutes before a warm goodbye, and decided in the end not to tell him about Michel. It was Dr. Bentsen who had said that having a constructive dialog with an inner voice was not to be mistaken for having multiple personalities, and in so doing he had created the conditions for her affair, yet she never had told him about it: Michel had been hers alone. She’d thought about telling him a couple of times at least, of course, but never did, too busy living the dream, too lazy to explain its convoluted premise, its complex technological meanderings, its irrational constructs… And she clearly had never cared about what the good doctor would have to say about it.
She headed to the spa where her massage was scheduled, very much looking forward to an hour of pampering and relaxation, just enough to prepare for the final task ahead: writing one last message to Michel. She was led to the dimly lit room and took off her clothes, transitioning from mental to physical therapy, as it were. She lay face down on the table, relaxing into the heated pad that was beneath her body, the heaviness of a sheet and blanket covering her. The therapist knocked lightly and greeted Catherine as she entered. The quiet strains of Asian music encouraged Catherine to breath deeply and let herself relax a little more. She felt the heated herbal pack being gently placed on her lower back, one of the areas where she often held tension. The sound of the pump which releases lotion into the therapist’s hands was soon followed by a firm and gentle caress on the soles of her feet, moving downward to the toes, then a slow knead of the calf muscles and somehow perpetually tight hamstrings. First one side and then the other. Each time the therapist moved to a new spot, she would carefully unveil it beneath sheet and blanket and cover the area she had just completed. Her hands move to the left buttock and lower back and Catherine began to sink a little deeper into the table. She felt fingers treading along her spine and ribcage toward the shoulders.
Then the therapist lifted the sheet and blanket, indicating that Catherine was to turn over just as the music had changed to Miles Davis' Kinda Blue. After adjusting the pillow under Catherine’s knees, she began again with the feet and continued the process up to the hips, each time carefully placing the covers so that modesty never be compromised. She removed an arm from beneath the blanket and gently manipulates the fingers, then wrist, up the arm and into the chest muscles. And now for the piece de resistance: the neck and head. With her heavy head gently resting in the strong hands of the therapist, Catherine slowly felt herself letting go, inch by inch, approaching a loss of consciousness as, for a few moments, she experience a sense of weightlessness -‐ absolutely no thought in her head. Slowly the therapist released her and murmured "Take your time". Left to bring herself back into the here and now, she sat up and reached for her clothes. Standing before the full-‐length mirror, she thought of how she still wished she could share this moment with someone. This had been a nice massage, but not quite the pleasure of the firm and sensuous touch of the man who had been her masseur for nearly four years: Philippe, a gay French aspiring ballet dancer with the most gorgeous accent and stunning good looks. Unbeknownst to her, he was an illegal alien and immigration had apparently caught up with him, leading to a hasty deportation that Catherine had been told about when she had tried to schedule an appointment with Philippe a couple of months ago.
During the drive home she pondered the sequence of events that had been the backdrop of her affair with Michel, and she still felt that it would be wrong to conclude that Philippe’s departure had precipitated her decision to end things with Michel, though she did feel in all good conscience that the coincidence was at the very least striking. What remained undeniable was the extent to which Philippe had inspired her relationship with Michel and her explorations with him of places she did not know before. If her Dr Bentsen had opened the door, Philippe had shoved her through it, however unwittingly, and with a song of all things, or rather an odd twist on the old Mondegreen. He would lace the soundtrack to her massages with old French torch songs and sentimental ballads, many of which she would eventually buy and become fond of. Perhaps the first of these was an old Gérard Lenorman tune, and having heard it two or three times she had asked Philippe what the lyrics meant, and he proceeded to sing the song with improvised English lyrics. What she heard was “You, the lover that I never had…”, and that night, she ‘met’ Michel. She would find out several weeks later that the true lyrics were “You, the brother that I never had, do you know if you had lived what we would have done together?” and thinking of it still made her laugh like a child will laugh at the sudden appearance of a bunny in the hat. She arrived home and, having a couple of hours before her husband’s return home, poured herself a glass of wine before making her way to her computer. She brought up her ‘secret’ e-‐mail account, re-‐read a few messages, then typed…
“My prince, my beautiful lover, my Michel This is it. My last message. I realized yesterday that I have arrived at my destination, and that this glorious adventure of ours must now come to an end. Why now, you might ask, but I don’t have an answer. Obviously I have been ready for a time, but it is only now that I feel it fully. Ready to resume the quiet course of my life without longing or unsatisfied lust. So what is it that you gave me that I could not get without you? In an odd way nothing that I did not already have, I suppose, but I needed you to see that. I have been and am still a desirable woman, desired in fact. I have been praised and receive praise still. Wife, mother, friend, confidant, lover even, I have been all of these, but in a way, never on my terms, always in relationship to the desires and expectations of others. So there we have it, I guess. I needed to find out who I am, who would come out if it were on my terms. It was glorious, and now I know. Or at least I know a lot more than I did before. I know about France and so many other places that I never knew I was so fascinated by. Who knew that New York was so full of ‘frenchness’? Well, admitting that I didn’t does say a bit about how sheltered I had become. I’m at the point now where I have had to tone it down and not jump up whenever I see a reference to anything French lest it arouse suspicion.
You were the perfect lover according to Catherine, and from the beginning you were full of surprises. All the desires I needed quenched, all the fears I needed quelled, so many things surfaced for you to mirror back to me. I suppose that the first real surprise was when I wrote back, though maybe that’s not really how it happened. I wrote to you with no expectation of a response, on a whim, or not, but more as an imaginary pen pal, one who would not criticize my ramblings nor analyze them like Michael Bentsen. I wrote a few messages and thought you would disappear, but when I read them back a few days later I was surprised at the intensity and I started wondering what a man could answer to such things, and as a game, I inserted some reactions into one of the messages. And then
I sent it to myself. And when I read it, it sent chills down my back.
To be honest, I thought about breaking it off more than once over the last four years. There were some really difficult times, times when you were taking up way too much room in my life. There were times when I really struggled with your very existence and what it meant in terms of my sanity. Does calling it a fantasy excuse what would otherwise have to be seen as irrational behavior? I would feel like the lonely voice in ‘Asylum’ yelling out ‘it’s just a game I play for fun’. Not that I ever felt that I was crazy or that it was crazy to have you in my life, but like with most affairs, the price of being caught would have been great. What would people think if they found out that I was writing to myself, leaving phone messages to myself…
I admit that I created you to find out what it would be like to be whisked away to a harem, and it was a great feeling. It is Ash Wednesday and I have no plans to anoint my forehead with ashes (although I am wearing black today!). I have come a long way from the devout Catholic girl of the past. I find myself moving more and more away from the repression of my upbringing -‐ and it feels damn good. I feel some pain at letting you vanish from my life, at losing my imaginary friend, but no sense of regret.
The Pleasure of M Page 15