Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  Sometimes a client will move up from Drear to Spells, even after many years. There was an actress once, as rageful as a bloody axe, who over time was soothed and then began—it seemed miraculous—to flourish. One day I saw how beautiful she had become, how vigorous, how eager for the world and its delights; how desirous, also, of transgression.

  I invented an excuse, claimed Drear needed to be reconfigured, and moved her to Spells. There I allowed her to seduce me: “I always,” she told me on her knees, “wanted this.” The affair triggered a shift in her expectations and charisma; she landed a major role downtown. That was ten years ago. And if her roles are now less glamorous, she still invites me to opening nights.

  Spells is the theater where my clients and I break all the rules. And this under the banner of Mindful Subversion, Convulsive Beauty. What happens here is stunning, somehow always unique, if orchestrated. I never forget that I am dealing with people who, despite their determinisms, their needful tenderness, their pride, can at any moment decide to kill me or call their lawyers. And so Spells is oiled with solicitude and sweetness and the infinite capacity that seems to be mine to convey that each transgression is unprecedented.

  To assure this impression, I have at times and after a period of months or weeks, revealed a previous violation many, many years before when I was green and still vulnerable. Such a revelation convinces the most skeptical of my good intentions, my passionate interest in them, and the anomaly our love affair represents. The lady in question, now a mistress, will assure me that my secret is safe with her, as safe as she believes she is with me. The affair remains circumscribed within the process of recovery.

  I do not accept gifts—apart from the little love gifts, so like those of high school girls, I simply cannot refuse. I explain that because our lovemaking is an extension of our work together, the fee will be the same. In this way I become my client’s whore. Yet I always manage to act professionally. My infatuations are in the service of knowledge. My clients love this! We fuck in the stellar radiance of knowledge and love. I am enamored of my profession.

  The women are intelligent, sexy, neurotic, funny, inventive, feisty, sprightly, and they are in need of me. They do yoga, tai chi; they are in fine fettle and in great shape. They play tennis; they go to the sporting club. They get massages and go to botox parties. They are as sleek as seals.

  The men … this is more complicated.

  5

  BACK TO AKIKO.

  My wife sells her curious work for astonishing amounts of money and so receives the bounty of my friendship without ambiguity. I do not “support” her and yet I do provide security, a sense of belonging, of having a place in the world. We are, after all, a couple. It never occurs to her that, as she cooks glue in her bower, I am extending the meaning, the expectations, the boundaries, and even the vocabulary of the therapeutic relationship. At the end of a long day, as I enjoy the raw oysters she has provided for my benefit, the Fanny Bays I especially appreciate, I think, I always do: Why tell her? Why torment her?

  And yet there are those times I would grab her by the hair and spit it all up in her face. Her pleasure in our life sending me into a rage difficult to contain. In these moments I must drop a clue or else explode.

  I tell her about a female patient’s sexual interest in dangerous men; a beautiful woman, milky skin; a strawberry blonde. I watch for signs. My wife puts down her fork and grows very still.

  I tell her about my concern for this patient’s safety. I see Akiko’s nostrils flare. My wife is gentle, rational. Coolly she says, well, of course you are concerned. This is what your work is all about. Your deep concern. For other people.

  “But this is different,” I tell her. “She puts herself directly in harm’s way. She has never known anything but rough sex. She fucks in toilets. She’s this beautiful woman and gives blowjobs—”

  “Stop it!” Akiko hits the table with her fist. “I don’t!” she cries out, her white cheeks rouged with dismay, “I don’t want to know about patients’ sexual lives! And I don’t! I don’t think you, goddamnit! should be telling me this. I’m not supposed to know this!”

  I was unexpectedly floored by this outburst, I was shamed. And fearful, also. Dropping clues is always a grave error and so I was quick to soothe her. I agreed that such problems were best kept locked away in Spells.

  “Spells?”

  “Ah.” I felt dizzy, a delicious feeling of descent into a pool of very deep water. A cooling pool. It was risky, another clue inadvertently dropped. But there was the weight, the gravitas of our decade together, Akiko’s and mine; I felt safe, and so I said: “Spells. My little name for the sessions. The more difficult sessions.”

  “Wow,” she said, considering. “I didn’t know. That’s interesting. I’m sorry,” she added, coming to me then and putting her arm around me. “After all this time together and still there is so much I don’t understand. Your work is strange!” she laughed, perhaps benevolently. “But. Understand. It’s hard to think about, you know, the women, hour after hour, talking about their sexual lives. I’m not always—how could I be? Up for it. I mean: the knowledge of that.”

  I thought about what to say next. The best way to diffuse the moment, to erase the clues. An apology, I thought. An apology is called for.

  “I am sorry,” I said to her. “What I did was inconsiderate.”

  “You’re really sweet,” she said. “I think we need a break. A little time away together.” It was true; we had not been away alone together for well over a year. There was so little time for that, and the risks were enormous.

  “As soon as the Practice lightens up a bit,” I told her, “we’ll go away. We’ll go off together.” At once I could see I had hit upon exactly the right thing to say: we’ll go off together, I repeated.

  6

  AKIKO HAD JUST RECEIVED a very large box of old papers from Bangladesh and Ethiopia, and so would, I knew, be occupied all evening unpacking and sorting these out. There was a time, and it was sweet, it was merry, when she would share these treasures with me and exclaim, with excited chirps, so like a child’s, her delight in a particular set of images or an image. Her collages rely on exotic scenes from places far away in space and time, which she deftly manipulates. The finished work is unusually big, the size of doors. She is currently at work on a triptych that, when done, will be over eight feet high and twelve feet across. This work has been commissioned by a museum in Basil? Beirut? No: Berlin.

  Perhaps my own notoriety will one day match hers. It is knowledge that interests me, although I would never deny the essential nature of art in our lives. Currently, I am writing a book; a large book; I am in the process of ordering several decades of notes and reflections. The tough question is, dare I reveal the nature of my investigations; dare I, finally, openly discuss Spells? And if so, am I “up” for the task of convincing the world that this work of mine is of real value; that it is not perverse; it is not “criminal,” but rooted in real tenderness, yes: it is impelled by, informed by, animated by love. If the inquiry is unabashedly rooted in the erotic impulse, it is also profoundly—and how could it be otherwise?—philosophical! Why shouldn’t there be a central place for lust in psychological inquiry?

  And if I am called the Marquis de Sade of psychiatry, what of it? Detested by some, venerated by others.

  A dangerous business in this proud, prudish land of ours. One risks being confused with horny priests. But, the body is imperious. And lust—we all know this!—is king! Why separate lust from the equation? As if. As if! An attractive man, a beautiful woman can spend an hour together in the isolation of the therapist’s compartment without thinking of cunt and cock! Without wondering what this particular cunt or cock is like! Because there are fascinating variations! Because there is always the promise of some mystery as yet unveiled! That this particular cunt will be dramatically unlike the last!

  And yet, simultaneously, there is the reassuring knowledge that a cunt is a cunt is a cunt! One will uncov
er an old familiar friend! One’s cock, one’s heart! is reassured and grateful. The danger has passed, lust is engaged, one frolics, one rejoices. Yes. That’s it: one rejoices!

  Or. Or not. One is angry, perhaps. One wanted more. One is wistful. Impatient. One is, I am, more and more often: bored. And she weeps. She blames herself. Her disastrous past. That nasty interlude in infancy with the wayward grandpapa. The violin teacher who poked her indiscreetly. The mother’s lover or daddy’s best friend. One will do the best one can—one always has to reassure her. And with patience and artful caresses, bring her to the happy land at last. So that she will return to Spells with the little gift one does accept: the curious seedpod found in the country road, a paperback on tantric sex, a handful of sand from a beach in Mexico.

  “You concern yourself with Heaven,” I joked to Akiko the next night over dinner—for her triptych, inspired by Bosch, has a scene of Paradise at its center; referring to my Practice I said: “I concern myself with Hell.”

  “Then we shall share limbo,” she said, I thought mysteriously. “If you give me Heaven and take Hell on alone—that is your intention?” she pressed me, I thought somewhat waggishly, “to keep Hell to yourself?”

  “All to myself!” I declared and lifted my glass to hers.

  But I thought this: Spells is not Hell. Well, sometimes. Not always. My patients thrive, actually. How could it be otherwise? We all love to be desired; fucking makes our day. Sometimes I feel like a tantric temple whore fucking in the name of the gods in a sacred space.

  But no. That’s not it, either. My patients are too crazy, too edgy, too needy, often too damned mean to fit that transcendent mode. They like it down and dirty. They want it hard and bad and so do I. In this way I am like them.

  7

  A DAY OF CONTRASTS. Akiko, taken up with the garden, plants shrubbery, all Japanese. Firs or pines. (Or both. I do not know anything about plants.) She has a longing for a world she never knew, or rather, has caught mere glimpses of on brief visits to the places of her parent’s infancies, having loved, above all, the gardens, simultaneously glamorous and spare. She, too, is glamorous and spare, as is the house, its luminous spaces solarized by things that give off light: lacquer ware, ceramics. (The world solarized is hers; a word I had never heard spoken aloud before I met her.) My irritation with marriage suggests that my wife is precious, perhaps. Snip, snap, she trims the shrubbery; I see her gaze for hours at a thing to assure some perfection invisible to me. For days she considers a view beyond a reach of trees, beneath a bough, between this sprig and that; she considers her entire universe in the same way she does her collages. When I first met her and I asked her what she did, she said, Oh, I rush after beauty! It’s something of a habit, a compulsion—that instant her laughter filled me with joy. And although it had never happened before, our paths began to cross. We met for lunch. She told me about things I had never heard about, let alone thought about. Netsuke. The frottages of Max Ernst. I began to reconsider the collections of Mexican folk art I had bought hastily, without much thought. I began to disengage from my marriage. I scheduled Akiko in. I began to plan my weeks around her.

  Today, as Akiko roams the grounds, I am locked away in Drear with a forlorn house painter, a man both self deprecating and pretentious, who obsesses over bushes of another kind, Kaitlin, a high school sweetheart whose thatch bubbled like a sea anemone in the bath. Black, luxuriant. Where, he wonders (he has for years) is Kaitlin now? She’d be sixty-four, as is he. He envies me (we are roughly the same age) for my full head of hair. Kaitlin must be gray by now. And my salary. Gazing out the picture window at one of Akiko’s impeccable vistas, he says: you have more, much more, than I ever even dared aspire to.

  “I should have dared!” he cries out, his voice strangled by a sob, “and now I’m bald and Kaitlin, all the Kaitlins, out of reach.”

  Then he tells me his terrible tale.

  Early in the week he had managed to slip away from his wife, who treats him imperiously and with a chronic distrust—for a full two hours. He found what he wanted: a peepshow. (I know the place he means; a dismal joint that needs an airing out, new carpeting, and better bathroom fixtures, etc.) He paid his money, sat down alone in the little cell provided, and waited breathlessly for a glimpse of Kaitlin in the bath, one last glimpse! For this was exactly how he imagined it, that the peepshow would provide a trip back in time. The woman appeared and without ceremony spread her legs, her pussy as hairless as an omelet. The experience has devastated him.

  For the rest of the hour, he rambles on and on about Kaitlin, his own wife’s ineptitudes, her packaged mashed potatoes, the way everything around him is shutting down, the fact that nothing since that view of Kaitlin in the bathtub has answered his hopes; the terrible memory of seeing a fellow named Brad necking with his sweetheart at the drive-in nearly fifty years ago, how the sorrow of that moment has haunted him throughout his life.

  “I cannot shake it, Doctor! I cannot shake it!”

  My client’s words clatter like gravel on the roof of my mind. I begin to wonder what Akiko has planned for dinner. I think: pad thai, attempting telepathy.

  As important as ideas are, nothing serves the self better than the flesh.

  Fucking, at its best, is silent. And yet what I have learned in my Practice is this: people want to talk about it all the time.

  That evening over Akiko’s gorgeous saffroned scallops I blurted:

  “An endless day! Endless. Tedious. How good these are!” I told her, feeling unusually expansive. “The hours away from you are long.”

  “It will be good,” said my wife, “when we can finally get away together.”

  But I cannot take a vacation. For one thing, a vacation means spending hour after hour in close proximity to Akiko and I might drop another clue. I always do. I cannot help myself. Worse than that I might find myself spilling more than clues.

  And she is a sweet person; my wife is a beautiful person. Kind. Perhaps too kind. A love like hers demands too much. She has her own practice. She practices innocence, blindness even. And this despite her worldliness, her sophistication.

  We were discussing my book.

  “All this talk I do with them!” I blurted out, impatient all at once with everything, “be damned! Let them go out and burn off their defeats with unbridled promiscuity!”

  Akiko took this as a joke of course.

  “Might work,” she said. “Except sex is pretty much what fucked them up in the first place.”

  It is possible that, if I have lost patience with ideas and with the vehicle that conveys them from our teeth and tongue and out into the air, it is because so many of my clients don’t know how to think. Inevitably they confuse apples with oranges. Because their parents confused love with hate, they have never learned how to listen to the inner logic of the flesh. Their lifesaving intuitive capacities must be uncovered, honed, and spurred.

  My science is an embodied science.

  There was a time, not very long ago, a lifetime ago, when he had loved Akiko as he had never loved before, or, at least, this is how it seemed. In Akiko he was sure he had found someone incapable of viciousness, brilliant, worthy. Yet even this was not enough to keep him from the things he is compelled to do to keep his head above water. He wades in heavy, black water that is always threatening to flood his life. There was a time with Akiko when the danger receded, but one day he awakened beside her and the safety she brought him had dissolved. Now he wears his horror in the world like a cloak and only in Spells or at the offset of a liaison can he shake it off.

  The proximity of the house he shares with his wife and the room where he betrays her and establishes his illicit itineraries has become problematic. He begins to consider shifting Spells to an office downtown. A downtown office is easy to justify. There are potential clients put off by the drive out to a residential neighborhood: a drive both time-consuming and expensive. He tells Akiko a downtown office will extend his clientele.

  The Cutter ha
s much to do with this. She is his current infatuation and perhaps his most dangerous. Lucy is risky, but she is a lightweight. If Akiko found out, she would be angry but not severely undone. He would be forgiven. But the Cutter. She is acute bad weather.

  He knows he must manage the affair better than he has; that he will have to end it before long. Weathers of all kinds have begun to change. He begins to seriously resent his wife’s purity. And yet he is—although he won’t be for long—grateful for her capacity to both love him and give him a great deal of room. He thinks it is fortunate, that she, too, needs room.

  For now all the rest is the edge upon which he glides. It is a necessary edge; he would not know how to live without it. But it is growing sharper and soon it will be razor thin. So there is this edge and on either side the dark water that will someday claim him. There is no way out of it. None that he can see.

  The downtown cabinet is his way of acknowledging to himself the risk he is in and the essential part risk plays in his life. These days he sleeps little, but when he does it is like sinking in cold mud. He awakens bruised and shaken. At dawn he enters the bathroom to shower. But first he goes to the mirror and examines his teeth.

  There is a brief moment when he sees Akiko carrying an armful of pruned branches against her chest. In that moment, there is no understanding why, he is overwhelmed with loss. He wonders if they will survive the winter.