• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 12337 0

she is driving at when she speaks of her current analyst, her fourth, a “Reichian,” one Dr. Pulvermacher, and then alludes to her “plateau.” I make flutters with my eyelids denoting an urgent need for sleep. And she goes on and on, those moist and precious Jewish lips, forever lost to me, driving home the sudden awareness that my poor dear joint for the first time in many hours is as shrunken and as small as that Worm whose replica hangs behind me, there in the papal bathroom. I yawn, ferociously, loud, but Leslie pays this no mind, seemingly intent that I should not go away with ill feelings, that I should somehow try to understand her. But I really don’t know if I want to understand. As Leslie continues I can only reflect despairingly on the obvious irony: that if through those frigid little harpies in Virginia I had been betrayed chiefly by Jesus, I have been just as cruelly swindled at Leslie’s hands by the egregious Doktor Freud. Two smart Jews, believe me.

“Before I reached this plateau of vocalization,” I hear Leslie say, through the surreal delirium of my fatigue, “I could never have said any of those words I’ve said to you. Now I’m completely able to vocalize. I mean those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everyone should be able to say. My analyst—Dr. Pulvermacher—said that the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What I say in reply is mingled with a yawn so cavernous and profound that my voice is like a wild beast’s roar. “I see, I see,” I yawn, roaring, “this word vocalize, you mean you can say fuck but you still can’t do it!” Her answer is a blur in my brain of imperfectly registered sounds, many minutes in duration, out of what I am able to salvage only the impression that Leslie, now deep into something called orgone therapy, will in the coming days be seated in some sort of box, there to absorb patiently waves of energy from the ether that might allow her passage upward to the next plateau. Close to the brink of sleep, I yawn again and wordlessly wish her well. And then, mirabile ditcu, I drop off into slumberland even as she babbles on about the possibility of someday—someday! I dream a strange confounded dream in which intimations of bliss are transfused with lacerating pain. It could only be a few moments that I drowse. When I wake—blinking at Leslie in the full flight of her soliliquy—I realize I have been sitting ponderously on my hand, which I withdraw from underneath my ass. All five fingers are momentarily deformed and totally without sensation. This helps to explain my ineffably sad dream, where, hotly embracing Leslie once more on the couch, I managed at last to fondle one bare breast, which, however, felt like a soggy ball of dough beneath my hand, itself tightly imprisoned within the rim of a murderous brassiere made of wormwood and wire.

These many years later I am able to see how Leslie’s recalcitrance—indeed, her entire unassailable virginity—was a nice counterpoint to the larger narrative I have felt compelled to relate. God knows what might have happened had she really been the wanton and experienced playgirl she had impersonated; she was so ripely desirable that I don’t see how I could have failed to become her slave. This would certainly have tended to remove me from the earthy, ramshackle ambience of Yetta Zimmerman’s Pink Palace and thus doubtless from the sequence of events that were in the making and compose the main reason for this story. But the disparity between what Leslie had promised and what she delivered was so wounding to my spirit that I became physically ill. It was nothing really serious—nothing more than a severe bout of flu combined with a deep psychic despondency—but as I lay in bed for four or five days (tenderly taken care of by Nathan and Sophie, who brought me tomato soup and magazines) I was able to decide that I had come to a critical extremity in my life. This extremity took the form of the craggy rock of sex, upon which I had obviously though inexplicably foundered.

I knew I was presentable-looking,