February 8, 2013--Chapter 25: I Married Lydia

It was during a disastrous and humiliating evening that I last saw Lydia.  That was, until the following summer.  And shortly after that, a mere eighteen months later, we were married. 

This is a lot to absorb, so let me go back a bit before telling you about what turned out to be truly disastrous. 

We met for the first time at the legendary West End Bar up by Columbia University.  It was legendary less because of its location or tepid beer than because it was the college haunt of the founders of the Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg.  Especially Ginsburg who inhabited the place instead of his classes; and, since he showed more promise as both a poet and drinker than a scholar, he had a stool set aside for him at the end of the bar’s long horseshoe. 

I came there a confused pre-med English major who was struggling less with organic chemistry than with what I wanted to do with my life.  My oxymoronic drift toward thinking about medicine by majoring in English should have been a clue that I was inclining toward writing and teaching rather than dissecting cadavers and being on call all night. 

One chilled autumn day, while peering into my beer glass, searching there, as had so many before me, for guidance, reading the remnants of the evaporating foam for answers, as out of a movie cliché, Lydia walked into my life.  Lydia Lichter from East Paterson.  Decidedly east of the Paterson, New Jersey of Ginsburg’s early years and where his idol William Carlos Williams wrote and practiced medicine I did not at the time know.  

But Lydia, in spite of the handicap of the mislocation of her birth, was a dancer, a modern dancer, which was evident by her cut-off black leotards, black tights, black beret, black jewelry, and black eye shadow.  She was a Barnard student, which, to a Columbia man, meant she was good at taking tests; but her real passion was for dance.  Martha Graham’s version, where her disciples, and Lydia was certainly one of those, spent endless hours writhing on the floor, learning and practicing the pelvic contractions that were at the heart of the Graham method.

That first afternoon, with her dancer’s feline assurance she slid onto a stool just to my left and ordered a Coampari and Soda, pronouncing it as one word, CampariSoda, which from the distance of these many years should have warned me not to pull my nose up from my beer mug and not to have said, as I did, referring to Martha Graham, “I thought she was dead.”

“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back, aggressively ignoring me, to her Dance Magazine and CampariSoda.

“I know that was stupid.” I said masochistically, “I’ve never known a modern dancer before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.” 

“You have a lot to learn,” She shot back, “about both dance and wit.  That I can see.” 

Benevolent fate, clearly, was not on my side, then or later; and so, without recounting any of the sordid details of why she would have thought to invite me to accompany her to a Merce Cunningham dance concert or why I would have accepted or more perversely why, never having been to a French restaurant, I would have made a reservation for us to go to La Cave Henri IV after Merce’s performance (she referred to him as Merce) let me bring you directly to the end of that fateful evening, after Lydia conversed with the waiter in flawless French after I did not know to taste the wine to test if it had turned (I thought it strange that le garcon had “served” me first before pouring a glass for Mademoiselle Lydia), let me take you to the entrance to her dormitory where, after my pathetic performance (I will spare you my fumblings with the escargot holder), I certainly was not expecting to “get any,” but I was hoping for at least a kiss, perhaps a French version, in the spirit of le soir, how, when I leaned toward her face, knowing in the dark, without being able to see, that that was where I would find her lips and perhaps, perhaps her mouth, at that very moment I could feel her turn toward me and heard her snap, “I hope I never see you again.  Too bad you didn’t go to Brooklyn College, where you belong.  Just my luck--now I have two more years to get through with you prowling around just on the other side of Broadway.”

From this you would undoubtedly imagine that when we unexpectedly encountered each other during the summer, just nine months later, at a children’s camp on Saranac Lake up in the Adirondacks, she would have shunned me and I would have dived for cover into the huckleberry bushes.  But rather we fell into each other’s arms like long-lost lovers.  And within forty-eight hours I had claimed that French Kiss.  Many in fact.  And much more.  In fact, I even “got some” on a lawn of balsam pine needles, under the boughs of a hundred year-old tree, with a trite half-moon cradled by the far edge of the lake. 

The coincidence of our meeting so unexpectedly, and up there of all places (the son of the camp owner was a classmate of mine, Lydia was employed as the dance counselor who, in just weeks, had transformed her minion into tiny Graham acolytes) made us think we were star-crossed.  Destiny had brought us together.  And the fact that we had both just finished reading Winesburg, Ohio and were halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, equally loving the dark and the darker, overcame whatever residual feelings there were about that night on the town and her wishing me banished back to my native borough.  

It also didn’t hurt that Lydia, also a student of Wilhelm Reich and his theories of orgone energy, had not to that midpoint of the summer “gotten” any, at least none that took her to the perfect orgasm about which Wilhelm wrote so eloquently.  And so I, in splendid shape from all my working out with the Columbia crew, puffed up with energy and rippling with muscles and flexible sinew, became the beneficiary of the other use to which the Graham contractions could be applied.  I learned that first night that they were good for use both on stage and off.  

As it turned out, Lydia alas informed me, that my energy was more of the athletic than orgone sort.  But I came close enough, rather Lydia came close enough, so that I continued to be useful to her at the end of the summer, back in New York City, where being separated by just Broadway turned out to be an asset rather than the liability she had earlier perceived it to be.  Prowling was now encouraged.  

And during my senior year, as we got to know and like each other while pounding away relentlessly in assorted sordid places, perhaps even once approaching the perfection she sought, Lydia agreed to talk about the possibility of getting married. 

“We could use the cash from the gifts,” I said. 

“And a better bed,” she winked. 

*    *    *

We were having sex when the phone rang.  Panting, Lydia said, “Don’t answer it.  I’m almost there.” 

“I have to.  It could be important.”  The phone continued to ring.  But I kept thrusting. 

“But I just had a small one; and if you keep it up I’m sure I can get there.”  That’s how she referred to it—“getting there.”  The ringing stopped but began again after a moment, sounding even more urgent.   

“I think I should answer it.  I’m waiting for a call from one of my professors.  About a paper that’s due on Thursday.”    It was Tuesday and Lydia and I had been at it for nineteen minutes.  That’s how I referred to it—as “at it.”   I had been keeping track of the duration on my new clock radio.  The number tabs flipped, and it was now twenty minutes.  

I reached across Lydia’s body and grabbed the phone.  She held onto my hips to make sure I kept the pumping going.  Which I did as I said, “Yes?”  

It was my father.  I covered the receiver and mouthed to Lydia, who was moving in perfect synchronization, “It’s my father.”  She made a face but held onto me even more insistently. 

“No, Dad,” I said, “we didn’t hear back yet if your sister Madeline will be coming to the wedding.”  Lydia began to moan.  I held my hand over the mouthpiece so her cries would not be heard back in Brooklyn.  “I know,” I said to him, “if she does you and Mom will be over the limit that the Lichters set for how many you can invite.”  I yelped because Lydia had dug her fingers into my ass as her writhing intensified.  

“It’s nothing, Dad,” he had heard me, “I just bumped my head on the night table.”  He asked if I was all right.  “Thanks.  No, it’s nothing serious.”  I mouthed to Lydia again that maybe she could slow down.  For Christ’s sake, I was talking to her future father-in-law.  She shook her head and resumed her moaning.  Twenty-three minutes had elapsed. 

“I’ll ask them if you can add a few more to your invitation list.  But you know, they’re paying for it so I’m not sure it’ll work.” 

I heard him begin to yell at my mother, who was clearly standing near the phone, “They’re so cheap.  I told you this whole thing was a mistake.  They should realize that Lloyd’s a pre-med so they’ll get a good return on their investment.”  Though the connection was crackling, it was an interborough call—at the time a version of long distance—I could still pick up his sarcasm.

Lydia began to slam her hands rhythmically against my threadbare mattress.  I slipped a pillow over her face to stifle what sounded like the beginning of whimpering.  But still my father asked, “What’s going on over there?  It doesn’t sound like studying.”  The number on the clock flipped again, signaling that twenty-six minutes had lapsed.

“I don’t know Dad, the connection’s lousy, but the people living next door sound as if they’re having a fight.”

“I told you not to move out of the dormitory into that flophouse.”  I had moved to the single-room-occupancy College Residence Hotel on Broadway and 110^th Street primarily to provide Lydia and me with the privacy to do what we were currently doing.  “The whole building is filled up with Puerto Ricans.  The last time I was there every name on the mailbox list was Rodriquez-this or Lopez-that.”

“That’s not true, Dad.  There are also two other guys from Columbia living here.”  I was glad not to be talking about the wedding set for June 18^th, four months from now.  I also hoped he was not hearing Lydia, who though she might have been suffocating, was pounding on the wall that separated us from Luis Rodriquez’s apartment.

“Let that cheapskate Dave Lichter know that his future son-in-law is going to be a doctor.  He’ll know what that means.”  I hadn’t as yet found the courage to tell my parents that I wasn’t going to medical school; that I planned instead to enroll in a masters program in literature.  I realized that I needed to do that soon—before graduation, which was just months away.  

But I was distracted again by the clock which ticked, indicating that it was about to be twenty-eight minutes—a new personal best for Lydia and me.  Though she was slowing down from either fatigue or lack of oxygen. 

“It sounds as if those Lopez people, or whatever their name is, have at least stopped fighting.”

Feeling as if I had again managed to hide the fact that Lydia was with me, much less what we were up to, I raced to get off the phone.  “I’ll see what I can do.  But Lydia tells me that her father has not been having a good year with his business.” 

“Tell it to the marines,” he said and slammed down the phone.  

Lydia was soaking wet.  And inert.  I checked to see if she was still breathing, using some of the pre-med skills I was about to jettison.   Luckily she was, but quiet shallowly, considering what she had put herself through.   I had begun to worry what I might say to the police.  And of course to both sets of parents.  Particularly mine.  I thought maybe I could weave together what happened to her with the pre-med news.

I noticed that she was mouthing words but I could barely understand them.  I bent closer so that my right ear was right by her mouth.   Furiously, she snapped at it, biting so hard that I could feel it beginning to bleed.  This was not rough loveplay.  It was clearly from frustration and rage.  “I don’t know what to do with you.” she had recovered enough to scream at me, “I’ve never had sex before with anyone like you.”  This was the first I learned that I was not her first.  “You’re useless!  How many times have I told you it’s all about the clitoris?”    She always pronounced it so deliberately, as if it was made up of more than three syllables.  

She swung her head violently from side to side.  I still lay on top of her.  “Get off me!” she commanded.  I literally became airborne as I unstuck myself from her pasty, bone-thin body.  She pulled the sheets up to cover herself and looked at me, not saying a word.  Just holding me in an angry glare.  

Then she said more softly, but with intensifying rage, “Since you won’t eat me or fuck me in the ass, which I know will get me there, there’s only one more thing you will do or the whole thing’s off.  Over!  Kaput!”   She slashed the side of her hand across her throat for emphasis.  

Since I was terrified by her threats, and because so many from my family had already been told to hold the date for the wedding, I held my breath, waiting to hear what that one more thing was. 

“You’re making an appointment to see my psychiatrist.  Maybe after a few sessions with him you’ll know what to do with that useless thing hanging between your legs and with what’s wagging in your mouth.”  

I felt the former shrinking to pigmy size. 

*    *    * 

So the following week I found myself trembling in the waiting room of Dr. Arthur Luven, the city’s leading Orgonomist.  The wedding invitations needed to be mailed out in a month but Lydia was holding the entire event hostage to my agreeing to have three sessions with him.  

Luven had studied in Berlin and New York with Wilhelm Reich himself, who in turn had been a student and colleague of Freud’s in Vienna.   Thus the pedigrees were outstanding, but the poster advertising Luven’s book, The Betrayal of the Orgasm, with the quote, “Honoring the body through the bioenergetics of cosmic energy—W. Reich,” suggested that just three fifty-minute sessions would be insufficient, considering the magnitude of the problem—getting Lydia there.  But I was pledged to keep our agreement and at least show up.  The wedding depended on it.

The door to Dr. Luven’s office opened.  I noticed that it was padded on the inside and at once realized why since the client he was cradling in his arms, as he helped her shuffle to the outer door, was crying, actually sobbing so convulsively that if it had been a normal door no one would have been willing to sit in the waiting room listening to what was going on behind it—they would for certain flee, even at the risk of jeopardizing the opportunity to, in his care, regain their stability.  On the other hand, I was also pleased to see that foam rubber tacked to his office door since who knew what I might be going through by session two or three?

After launching her toward the elevator, the doctor turned to me.  I put down Ogonomy Today, in which he was prominently listed as Senior Contributing Editor, and extracted myself from the velvet chair.  I towered over him.  My six-four made his five-two look insignificant.  Though even thus foreshortened, I was struck by the fact that he seemed to be almost all head.  Actually, all hair. 

From the gray-streaked wires that sprang from the top of his skull as if it had been struck by lightening to the eyebrows which sprouted like tangled briar and, above all, because of that moustache which appeared to have been inspired by a horse’s mane, from this mass of hair I, for a moment, did not notice that he was wearing a brown tee shirt with a gold ying-yang symbol embossed on the pocket, suede hiking pants, and on his bare feet Franciscan-monk sandals.   I knew at once that I was no longer in the hands of the avuncular legend, Dr. Holsager, the Zazlo family physician, with his pencil-thin moustache and black Oxfords. 

When Dr. Luven ever so slowly raised that head to lock onto my eyes, his penetrating gaze radiated so much heat that I immediately began to sweat.   Could this be, I wondered, my first blast of Orgone Energy?  But while blotting my eyes I managed to stammer, “I’m Lloyd Zazlo.  Lydia Lichter’s fiancé.  She sent me to see you.” 

“Yes, I know about you.”  With the tincture of a German accent that he must have acquired while studying with Reich in Berlin, from Lydia I knew he had been born and raised on Long island, on the South Shore, the I know and the you sounded ominous.  

I understood of course that whatever Lydia might have told him about me would not have been positive.  If it had been, why then would I be there in his clutches?  I also knew that whatever help I might receive would not be assisted by my thinking about myself as his captive.  I needed to feel I wanted to be there, that I wanted his help.  But since he had gripped my right bicep so firmly that no blood was able to flow to my fingers and they thus immediately began to tingle and then go numb, I was very much literally in his clutches.  Held that way, he led, perhaps more accurately, he pulled me into his chambers.  And they were that—chambers.  Gloomy ones. 

As I became adjusted to the filtered light, I saw that everything in his office was fabricated from leather.  The walls were covered in it as was the furniture, including the top of his desk.  Even his telephone sat in a leather-tooled cradle.  And they were a perfect complement to his pants and sandals.  So much so, as if camouflaged, that he effectively disappeared when he took his place behind his embossed and brass-studded desk.  While the rest of him was absorbed into the leather atmosphere, his face was visible, in spite of the fact that it was covered with that electrified hair, illuminated by the whiteness of his teeth, which below his moustache, threw off light like a pulsing strobe.

He made a steeple of his hands, leaning toward where I sat on a stool on the opposite side of his desk (I was to learn that his techniques were not about engendering comfort), saying nothing, totally still, as if he in this way was deciphering the mysteries encrypted in my soul, psyche, or wherever. 

Afraid to move my head, but using my peripheral vision, I saw that his book shelves contained not just a library of expected Orgonomy texts, including many in German, but interspersed among the books were grotesquely carved wood and straw masks from Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands.  Lydia had told me that Dr. Luven possessed a world-famous collection of native and Pre-Columbian sculpture.  That he specialized in Xipe effigies, charred clay figures of the shaman who presided over the ceremonies and offerings to the Aztec god of spring, priests who were always represented as dressed in the skins of their sacrificed and flayed victims.  Thus garbed was the one I spotted on a table that stood next to the only piece of furniture that felt incongruous—a small unmade camp bed on which there appeared to be a battered tennis racket. 

I was brought back to concentrating on him  when Dr. Luven said, “We will now begin.” 

“Sure.  Whatever you say.”  I tried to lighten the mood by chirping, “That’s why I’m here.” 

Not in any way amused, Dr. Luven directed, “Go, stand over there.  Next to the light.”  He pointed toward the cot and effigy.  “And take off your shirt and trousers.”  I looked at him questioningly before getting up.  I knew he was a doctor, an MD, but he was a psychiatrist so why did I need to take off my clothes?   “For now,” he added, “you can keep the rest on.” 

By my rising so slowly I imagine he sensed my puzzlement and reluctance.  “Don’t worry,” he snorted, “I won’t hurt you or ask you to bend over.”  At that he smiled, “I want to examine your blockages.” 

“My what, Dr. Luven?”  I had moved over to where he wanted me to stand and was slowly unbuttoning my shirt.  I did notice that on the bed it was in fact a tennis racket. 

“While you’re doing that, since you are obviously ignorant about bioenergetics, I will give you a brief, a very brief lesson.  We do not have that much time.  You should buy the book.  It is very good.  I recommend it.  It’s on sale at Salters up by Columbia.” 

I slipped off my shoes and began to unzip my fly.  I could already feel his eyes on my chest.  “Bioenergetic psychotherapists,” he began, “believe that there is a connection between the mind and the body.  What affects the body affects the mind; and what affects the mind does the same to the body.  The defenses you use to handle pain and the stresses of life--rationalizations, denials, and suppressions--are reflected in the physical patterns of your body.”  I had dropped my pants and they lay gathered at my ankles.  I was not ready to kick them away just in case there was a fire and I needed to bolt for the street.   

“I can already see in your body, even through that sweaty undershirt, that your breathing, revealed by the shallow movement of your diaphragm, exposes your, forgive me for being so direct, your inept attempts to deal with pain.”  Hearing this I took two quick, hopefully very visible deep breaths but became so dizzy that I almost fainted and thus immediately returned to my normal, inepter breathing pattern.   

“These defenses, these somatic blockages of yours manifest themselves in your body in ways that inhibit self-expression.   I have been trained to discover them through careful observation.  That’s why I have you standing there shivering.”  Through the half-light I thought I detected another smile.  “I can locate these defenses from the quality of your handshake, which by the way was quite revealing; from your posture, truncated and clearly adopted by you to cut your head off from your diaphragm (very common in cases such as these); from the tone of your voice, totally uncertain, almost a whisper; from the way you move, in your case shamble would better categorize it—to help you I need to be frank with you; and from the amount of energy you radiate, especially that, which again in your situation needs to have its wattage increased.” 

At that I saw his electrified teeth throb.

Even more anxious than when we began, I tried to sneak a look at my watch to see how much time remained and how soon I would be able to escape.  I was sensing that I would need three years and not just my agreed-upon three sessions to deal with all of my blockages, handshake, and also my diaphragm.  As if reading my mind, which I assumed he was quite adept at doing—after all reading minds was his business--he assured me, just as I was about to dissolve in despair, “Do not be discouraged by my analysis.  All of these things I have seen before and have been trained to observe.”  At that he nodded toward a photograph of his mentor, Wilhelm Reich, adding, “And cure.”  

I began to breathe again.  I sensed perhaps in more depth.  Could it possibly be that I was already making progress?  “We have time to deal with all of this.  In fact, I have had a cancellation for tomorrow so please return here to me then.  And after that we will still have one more time together.  I know just what to do to you.”  

I shuddered at the to do to you.  

“And you can now please pull up your trousers.” 

*    *    * 

Back at the College Residence Hotel I immediately called Lydia who was in her dorm room at Barnard.  To report to her as she had instructed. 

“He wants to see me again tomorrow.”  I thought it wise not to initiate anything about what Dr. Luven had said about my handshake or diaphragm.   This was consistent with what Lydia typically told me after her sessions with Dr. Luven—she shared nothing.  Whenever I asked what happened with Dr. Luven, she cut me off, saying what goes on between a psychiatrist and client is confidential. 

But in spite of this, she probed, “So what did he say is wrong with you?” 

“Well, you know, as you keep telling me, that’s supposed to remain between just Dr. Luven and his patients.”

“Look, we know why you’re seeing him.  We both understand what’s wrong with you.  But I also need to hear what he said so I can know what to expect from you.  I don’t plan on waiting forever.  You know very well what this is about.  So enough with playing coy.  I don’t have all night.  I have a paper due in three days.” 

“I’m not sure Lyd that I should be telling you anything.  Won’t it interfere with my treatment?  I mean, it’s pretty private stuff.” 

“OK,” she said, she would have none of my evasions, “So he had you take off your clothes.  What’s the big deal with that?  It’s the only way he can do his analysis.  He always works with me in my underwear.  Or naked.”  I tried to block that image from my mind.  

“So what did he say about your breathing?  I’ve always thought that was at the center of your problem.  In fact, that’s what my paper’s about—somatic blockages.  In your case, I’m sure that’s where the primary impediment is.  He needs to break that down.”

At the thought of his breaking that down, and that Lydia might be writing about my diaphragm, I felt my breathing begin to regress back toward shallowness.   I needed to tell her something so I said, “I like his office.  It’s very interesting.  Everything’s leather.  And like you said there are all those statues.  He’s so short and has all that hair.” 

“Just as I imagined,” she shot back, “Now I also have to deal with avoidance.  Here I am trying to save our relationship and all you can talk about are his eyebrows.  Pathetic.”  I didn’t respond, but she added with a dismissive sigh, “I have to go.   I need to get back to work.” 

I obviously needed to say more.  “Wait.  He also told me that he can help me.  Cure me.”  I heard her snort. 

“I’ve been going to Arthur for five years and you think he can ‘cure’ you in just three sessions?”  I could hear her laughing and muttering something to her roommate Helga.  Helga had her own psychiatrist, not an Orgonomist but a follower of Karen Horney; and though they had long fights about psychoanalytic theory, they were obviously now united in their amusement at my situation.  “I can’t wait to hear what happens tomorrow,” she continued, more I sensed for Helga’s pleasure than out of any concern for me.  “Maybe he’ll put you in his Orgone Box and bake you a little.”  

At that, in the background, Helga shrieked.  And Lydia hung up. 

Shaken by what appeared to be Lydia’s lack of understanding, I lay on my bed and fretted while watching the last light from the other side of the Hudson track across the opposite wall.   And from next door, bleeding through that wall, I heard Luis Rodriquez playing cords on his guitar.  And beginning to sing, as plaintively as was my mood— 

Tu amor, tu inmenso amor me lLena de alegria
Tu amor, tu inmenso amor es mas que compani

It took me some time but eventually I concluded that I deserved more than understanding from Lydia—it was not unreasonable to expect a little sympathy.  What I was going through, was being compelled to go through, was not easy for me.  More than anyone else, Lydia should have realized how difficult it was for me to be so exposed.  With Dr. Luven, or Arthur, to be so literally exposed.  To be forced to stand there half-naked, maybe next time like Lydia fully naked, while he dissected me with his eyes.  That’s what it felt like—like being cut open.  

OK, she was a dancer and being examined that way was familiar to her.  But I was never comfortable talking showers in locker rooms.  I thus thought, screw it, I’m not going back there tomorrow.  Even if it means Lydia calling off the wedding.  I would find a way to explain it to my parents—not about Dr. Luven of course, I was paying him with my own money.  And while I was at it I would slip into the conversation that I wasn’t going to medical school.  I’d get it all over with at once—no wedding, no becoming a doctor.  

But just as I was becoming comfortable with my decision to end things, remembrances of naked Lydia flooded my mind.  Not the naked Lydia in Dr. Luven’s chambers, but rather with me, right here in this room and, from earlier, under those balsam trees, in the moonlight, beside Saranac Lake.  Though I had been failing to get her fully there, we had come close a few times. And I was determined to do better. 

Luis continued to sing about amor, as if he felt the turmoil just next door, in my lonely room—

Tu amor, tu fiel amor es siempre a mi lado
Tu amor es mas que amor, tu amor es un mila

Lydia had come to want to be with me, pushed me to keep trying to satisfy her and with that came to find me interesting and amusing.  She believed in my prospects, in fact she had encouraged me to give up on the doctor fantasy, more my parents’ than mine, and pursue my more substantial interest in literature.  My passion, she called it.  “Follow your passion,” she had counseled. 

And Lydia had been my first fully physical lover, even more so than my German baroness, Sigrid from my sophomore year—Lydia had given herself to me with total, unquestioning abandon and had brought me into her suburban world of comfort and certainty and her city world of art and culture.  Both places I longed to inhabit.  And thus I wanted to do better, to find a way to make things work and get married, even at City Hall if it came to that.  

So I vowed to return to Arthur’s office the next day; and if he required it, take off all my clothes and, if necessary, even climb into the Orgone Box.  Whatever that was. 

Tu amor es mas que amor . . .  Luis, in his own loneliness, whispered. 

*    *    *

Even before asking me to undress, Dr. Luven told me a little more about Bioenergetic Analysis.   He was wearing the same clothes as the day before except that for the second session his shirt was red, not brown.   It still, though, was embossed with the ying and the yang.  And all of his hair remained as it had been, welded in place.  “We spoke yesterday about repressions and how they express and reveal themselves in the body.  Through our work together these repressed emotions will emerge.  You will begin to realize that your blockages are inhibiting your capacity to express spontaneity and creativity.” 

I was balanced on the stool again and made a conscious attempt to sit up straight and breathe deeply.  I also remembered to nod my head so he would know I was understanding and agreeing.  “Because of these defenses,” he went on, acknowledging my nodding by nodding reciprocally, “you are restricting your capacity to feel and to have fulfilling relationships.  You are not free enough in your body yet to feel joy or anger, happiness or sadness, love or sensuality.  That above all—sensuality.”   At the latter I nodded so vigorously that I felt myself beginning to slip off the leather stool. 

“And neither are you unblocked sufficiently to bring full satisfaction to another.”  With this pronouncement he looked straight at me; and I knew from this that he had had full reports from Lydia.
“For that reason, today, you will sit for five minutes in the Orgone Energy Accumulator.”  Just as Lydia had predicted.  “I do not want you to feel any anxiety about this.”  He could feel some beginning to emanate from me.  “I will keep very strict track of the time.  I assure you that it will not be for a second more than five minutes.”  I resumed my nodding.

“But before we do that, we must talk about the orgasm.”  I knew we would get to that and now bobbed my head weakly.  “Reich of course will be our guide.”  I did not need to be told that.  Dr. Luven gestured toward that section of his bookshelves where he kept his German texts.  “He taught that feeling sexual love depended on the ability to have intercourse with ‘Orgastic Potency.’  He was a true scientist, not just a theorist, and he therefore measured the orgasm itself.  He found that it proceeds in four distinct phases--first, the psychosexual build-up of tension; second, the tumescence of the penis or clitoris, which occurs with an accompanying electrical charge that he was actually able to measure.  Think of that.”  I indeed was.  As was he as he instinctually touched the crotch of his leather pants as if indicating where Reich had attached his electrodes.  I was doing more or less all right up to that point but felt myself cringing at the thought of the good doktor measuring the electrical charge of my tumescence. 

“And of course,” Dr. Luven checked his watch and raced ahead, “he discovered an electrical discharge at the moment of orgasm itself—a considerable discharge.”  He grinned at that.  “And then finally he noted something with which you are already familiar, the relaxation of the penis and clitoris.”  It was true that I was at least familiar with the former anatomical part and thus could nod at him convincingly. 
“He believed the force that he measured during sexual intercourse was a distinctive type of energy that is found in all life forms.  Reich called it ‘orgone’—from ‘orgasm’ and ‘hormone.’  This is sexual energy, blue primordial energy that he discovered permeating the entire universe.  Everything.  Everywhere.”

He sprang from his chair, clapping his hands energetically, and said, “It is now time to bring out the Accumulator.  It is right there behind that curtain.”  He pointed toward the far corner which was so dark that I had not until then noticed the curtain made up of hanging leather straps.  “Please help me with it.  It is quite heavy.”  He leapt across the room and, gathering a handful of the straps in his hand, held them to one side to reveal it.

I had gotten up off the stool and turned to it as if transfixed.   And there it was at last—the Orgone Box.  In the flesh, so to speak.

“You can see,” Dr. Luven said with a hint of pride, “it is a six-sided box, a hexagonal, a universal form fraught with cosmic meaning, constructed of alternating layers of organic materials, such as wood and leather,” he smiled when he said leather, “to attract the orgone energy, and metallic materials—steel wool and aluminum are preferred--to radiate that energy in toward the center of the Accumulator.  Toward where you will be placed.”  

It was not very large, no more than four feet high, about the size and appearance of a small refrigerator, and I worried that I would not be able to be fitted into it.  But, as I was wondering about this practical matter, I caught myself and thought about more existential issues—What if I am able to be squeezed into it, what then will happen to me?   When I emerge, what kind of person, more to the point, what kind of creature will I have been transformed into after absorbing five minutes of all that cosmic energy?  Would I be capable of finishing my courses, graduating, and going on to graduate school?   And what about the wedding?  

But just as I was about to seek a pretext to leave, to claim I had forgotten another appointment and needed immediately to go, Dr. Luven, as he did the day before, grabbed hold of me, by my bicep again, and took me unceremoniously to the Accumulator.  “Here, help me pull it more into the room.”  Putting my concerns aside, I did as I was told.  “You will sit in it—see there is a bench inside--and absorb the energy through your skin and, as you breathe, your lungs.  This will bring energy to your blood and to all your bodily tissue and by so doing will improve the flow of your life-energy and help you begin to overcome all of those many, many energy blockages we encountered yesterday.  And all of this in just five minutes.  As I promised, not a second more.”  I was glad to have him reiterate the “not-a-second-more” promise. 

“Of course, the Accumulator is just a tool, an essential tool to be sure, but you will still very much need me to work with you.  To lead you to feel.”  In truth I was calmed to receive that assurance—that I would not be left to be cured on my own by just sitting cramped in that hexagonal refrigerator.  And, most important, that he would be there to open the door to extract me from it.  To free me if I required it.

“Now get out of those clothes,” he clapped his hands again. “All of them today.”  I obeyed that command as well and began hurriedly to strip.  “And when you are seated, I will then close the door and keep the time.”

It took me less than a minute to become naked.  I did not bother to fold my clothing.  I simply tossed everything onto the cot, covering the tennis racket.  “Very good,” he said, peering for the first time at my penis.  I of course hoped he found it to be acceptable or, minimally, promising. 

“It is a small space,” I jumped at the word small, “Intentionally so, to help with the energy gathering; but if you contract yourself a bit, you will find that you will fit.  I have had patients even longer than you.”  I glanced at him to see where his eyes were focused, wondering if he was making a pun.  And then, with Dr. Luven assisting by pushing on my back and shoulders, I utilized to good effect what Lydia had taught me about Martha Graham’s contractions; and by applying that experience to this circumstance was able to contort myself sufficiently so that with less difficulty than I had anticipated found myself packed somewhat painfully in the Accumulator. 

As he was about to close and latch the door, Dr. Luven said, for the first time in a gentle voice, “It will be pitch black in there.  And totally silent.  That is by design.  If you are fortunate and the energy finds you today, and it may not, you will feel very little, but the chamber itself will be filled with blue orgone light.  And when you emerge we will immediately begin to attack the blockages.” 
And then he swung the door closed.  And just as he had promised, it was so silent in there that I did not even hear the click of the latch.  And it was so dark that I could not see my hand held right before my eyes.  That is, if I had been able to raise it—I was so stuffed in and folded upon myself that there wasn’t room enough to blink my eyes much less raise a hand or scratch my neck, which, confoundedly, immediately began to itch.

Crunched that way, with nothing to see or hear much less do, I tried to monitor the time by counting seconds, both to occupy myself as well as to check on Dr. Luven’s time-keeping--“One, one-thousand; two, two-thousand, three, three-thousand . . .”  And when I got to what I thought was ninety seconds, an interminable time with still an endless three-and-a-half minutes to go, I began to hear, more accurately to experience the hint of a faint melody.  So soft it was that it felt as if its source was from far away, from a place beyond both the Orgone Box and Dr. Luven’s chambers. 

I stopped my counting in an attempt to listen as it modulated into what I can only describe as an unearthly sound as it was such a unique, such an ethereal melody.  If I had been a skeptic, I would have thought he had it piped in, just as false mediums faked the appearance of ghosts during séances.  Or if I had been living in an earlier era, I would have thought I had tuned in to the Music of the Spheres.  But then, if I had been a believer, I would have been convinced it was coming from another world, perhaps even from a place beyond time, or from a time after all has ended. 

I was clearly being propelled beyond time and place and was ironically hoping that Dr. Luven had had to take an emergency call or needed to respond to a patient’s nervous breakdown and was on his way to Bellevue and had thus lost track of time, and me.  Five minutes now hardly felt like enough, even if I was “baking” in that box as Lydia had derisively joked.  Especially since, in what had heretofore been utter darkness, I began to experience light. 

As I am colorblind I was not sure if it was blue—the true Orgone Blue—but there was evidence of luminosity.  Blue, white, ultra violet, infrared, it mattered not to me.  In that opacity there was now miraculously light.  With the sounds of Heaven playing in my ears and these bursts of cosmic radiance ricocheting off the inner aluminum liner, I was being converted into a Reichian, a Luvian, even a Lydia Lichteran.  I couldn’t wait to take up my life, what promised to be a truly different life, a radically new life, once I emerged from that Box.

And it was sure to be a life suffused with “Orgastic Potency” since, as I sat there, still folded in a fetal ball, amazingly finding a space in those cramped quarters, my penis began to stiffen and expand, to tumesce, into the longest, hardest, thickest boner of my life.  I couldn’t wait to tell, better, to show it to Lydia.

Thus excited—with the Spheres still singing, the light still crackling, and my penis still expanding—the door snapped open and in the by-contrast blinding light of his office, I saw the diminutive Dr. Luven bending in half to retrieve me from that tiny box. 

It was not surprising that the first thing he spotted, which because of its size and color—I had color vision enough to know it was a blazing scarlet—and of course because it was the subject of his life’s work and devotion, the first thing he noticed and commented upon was my erection, “As Dr. Reich, would say,” he winked “zehr gut, very good indeed.”  I could not help but share his enthusiasm.

He reached out to me and I took hold of both his hands because I needed literally to be pulled from the Accumulator.  As I stood unashamedly before him, he continued to hold on to me, taking me in, all of me, pausing with evident pride at what was most prominent. 

“Excellent,” he reiterated.  “We are now beginning to make progress.  You are already longer.”  I moved to try to cover myself.  “I should have said ‘taller,’” he smiled.  “Look at you!  Look at the posture.  Not so much anymore a schlump.”  I squared my shoulders further, taking pleasure in towering over him, even in my bare feet.

“Lean forward,” he said, “I think I see something.”  I was pleased to comply and bent toward him as he backed away a bit to get a better look at me.  “Yes, I see them there—more blockages.  I did not notice them before because you are so tall.  They are in your shoulders.  Here let me have them.”  At that, with me still leaning forward, he reached up to take hold of the flesh and sinews above my clavicles, between my neck and shoulder sockets.  He simultaneously clenched both sides in vise-like grips so powerful that I let out a series of yelps and cries that would easily have been audible in the waiting room if the door had not been padded.

I began to sob and, I need to reveal, ejaculate.  Both at once, all over his suede hiking pants.

“Zehr gut,” he said again,” not even noticing that I had ruined his pants.  I, on the other hand, cringed in embarrassment.  “Do not be concerned,” he said, “this form of therapy is very messy work.  But the first blockage is overcome,” I wasn’t in truth sure which one he was referring to since the two gushers had erupted at the same time. 

“Next Tuesday when you come again to see me, we will really begin to get to work.”

Though I could not begin to imagine what more could happen to me, I was glad to be able to wipe myself off, get dressed, and leave because after this session I was eager to share it, and hopefully me, with Lydia. 

But when I called to see if she could come over to the College Residence Hotel to hear and witness, she rebuffed me, even though I promised to tell her about the session, that it might help her with her paper, which she reminded me was due in a couple of days.  As a further enticement, I promised that I might also be able to give her a demonstration of what I had happened to me in the Orgone Box, thinking she might “get there” and thus be able to write about that as well.  I was feeling that good about myself.  And that shameless.  But still she put me off, agreeing, though, to talk with me, a sort of date on the phone, at 8:00 that evening.

*    *    *

At precisely 8:00 I called.  Her roommate Helga answered, which was a disappointment because in anticipation of an intimate call, I had darkened my room, gotten undressed, and lay stretched out on my bed, tracking the sun as it lunged toward the moraines of New Jersey.  “She went out for a sandwich,” Helga said, “She’s been working so hard on her psych paper that she forgot to eat anything.”  This broke the mood and I snapped on the bedside lamp.   “She told me, though, that you had your second session with Dr. Luven and that you wanted to tell her about it.”  I was upset that Lydia had shared that with her, particularly since Helga was a neo-Freudian.  “She asked me to take notes about what happened so maybe she could use some of it in her paper.”

I jumped up.  Lydia this time had gone too far.  “She what?” I yelled into the phone.

“She thought you could tell me about being in the Orgone Accumulator and what happened to you after you got out.”  I was trembling with rage and should have hung up.  “That I would write it down for her.  She said you wouldn’t mind.  I’m taking psych courses too.”  I heard her muffled voice—she had covered the phone and was talking to someone else who was in the room.

I shouted at her, “Who’s there with you?  Is it Lydia?  Put her on.  This is just crazy.”

“No, it’s not her.  It’s my boyfriend Carl.  Do you know him?  Carl Horowitz.  He’s also a senior at Columbia.  I thought he also might like to hear about Orgone Therapy.  He’s pre-med and just got accepted by NYU Med School and is thinking about becoming a psychiatrist.”  I continued to shake with anger at having been turned into a living exhibit of Bioenergetic Analysis.  I had been expected, hoping for something very different that evening after what I had experienced, but rather found myself stamping around my room, stark naked, feeling that half of Barnard and Columbia poking at me.

“Here, Lloyd, here’s Carl, he wants to say hello.” 

And with that Carl was on the phone, saying, “Hey, Lloyd.  Did we take Organic together?  I seem to remember you.  Tall, poor posture, already losing your hair?  That’s you, right?”

“That’s not me,” I shot back at him, though how he described me was unfortunately accurate enough.
“It’s OK, man.  Be cool.  I was just wanting to be friendly.  I can’t wait to hear what happened to you in that contraption.  I’m thinking about studying to be a shrink myself.  I got into NYU you know. . . .  Hey, Helga, what’s that friggin box called? . . . The Origami Box? . . .  No?  Sorry--the Organic Box. . . . I know, Helga. . . .  She says I’m such a jerk. Anyway, let me put her back on.  If OK with you, man, I’ll pick up the extension so I can hear all about it direct from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”  He dropped the phone on the floor, but between the echoing sounds it made as it rattled around I could hear him roaring with laughter.

Helga was back on the line, “OK, so he had you take off your clothes right?  Talk slowly, OK, so I can write it all down.” 

I don’t know what impelled me to answer; that probably would take a fourth session with Dr. Luven to figure out. “Yes I did.”

“Everything?  I mean last time you kept your underwear on, right?”

I whispered, “Yes.”

“Yes what? Underwear on or everything off?  Lydia said to press you about that.  She feels that’s very important.”

“Everything.”

“Good, everything.  So you were naked? . . . Will you please stop that Carl.”

“Yes.  That too.”

“So you weren’t wearing anything at all when you got into the box?”

“That’s correct.”

“And what did Arthur, I mean Dr. Luven tell you would happen to you in the box?”

“That I might see some blue light.”

“Even though it’s pitch black in there?”

“Yes.  He said that it might or might not happen.”

“And did it?”

“Yes.”

“Was it blue? . . . Will you stop giggling,” she barked at Carl, “and take you hands off me! . . . What color was it?  Lydia says that’s also very important.”

“I don’t know.  I’m not sure.”  Somehow Helga was pulling me along against what I thought to be my will.

“You’re not sure?  Lydia will kill me if I don’t find out.  Try to remember.”

“It could have been.  I’m colorblind.”

“Of course, you would be wouldn’t you.”  She sounded exasperated. “OK, I’ll make a note of that . . .  ‘He’s colorblind,’” she repeated it to herself.  “And what else?  What else happened?  And can you maybe speed it up? I only have a few more minutes.  I also have a paper due.”

“Well, I think I also heard music.  Or something that sounded like music.”

“Uhmm,” she neutrally said.  It sounded as if she was already acquiring the skills needed to be a therapist.

“It wasn’t piped in as far as I know though that would be easy to fake.  The light too.  But I think, considering what else happened, that both could have been from the orgone energy.” 

“Will you please get away from me,” she hollered, “I not playing games here.  Leave.  And I mean now!”  I heard him stomping across the floor and then the sound of the door slamming.  “He’s such an animal.  I don’t know why I put up with him.  What a moron.  But he did get into NYU.  Though how I’ll never know.”  And without missing a beat, she said to only me, we were alone now, quoting me back to myself, “‘Considering what else happened.’  Lydia will want to know all about that.  And so do I, I should add.”

I realized I had said too much.  But still I did not hang up and continued as if under Helga’s spell.  “I sat in the Accumulator, rather I was so packed into it I could hardly breathe, but as I experienced the music and saw the light throbbing I began, incredibly, to . . .  I don’t know how to put it.”

“You’re doing fine,” she said, in an uncharacteristically gentle voice.  I felt her right there with me, in my ear, almost in my room.  I lay back down on my bed again and switched off the light.  “I think I know what happened.  Lydia prepared me for this.  She told me about some of her own experiences in the Accumulator. . . .  You can tell me.  I’m right here.  Right there with you.”

“I began to get hard.” 

I said it so softly that Helga said, “You what?  I couldn’t hear you.  It must be the connection.”

“I got hard,” I said again.  Much louder.

“As we suspected,” Lydia responded, sounding professional.  “I mean,” she adjusted her tone, almost whispering, “I understand.  It’s natural.  And beautiful.” 

It was beginning to happen to me again as I lay there looking out toward the Hudson with the siren-soft sound of Helga’s voice coming through the phone.  “Well, it was different.  I never experienced anything like that before.  Anything that powerful.  Some force had taken over my entire body.” 

I took a chance, “And it’s happening again.  While I’m talking to you about it.  I probably shouldn’t be telling you that.”  I felt my breathing intensify at this confession.  “But it feels good.  Almost as good as this afternoon.  Amost as  . . .”

But, before I could say another word or take another shortened breath, Helga interrupted, Lydia’s assistant again, “And did you come all over him?”

*    *    *

The following Tuesday I found myself back in Dr. Luven’s waiting room, excitedly anticipating my third and final session.  I was hoping there would be enough time to talk with him about the many things I had been thinking about since last week.  From all that had happened, I could barely sleep and had not been able to concentrate on my classes.  In addition, I was especially pent up and frustrated since Lydia had refused to see me before I had completed all three sessions, saying, “Before I let you see me, much less touch me, you need to complete your side of the bargain.”  So there I was waiting to complete it.

Thus when Dr. Luven ushered me into his office, after first checking to see that the Orgone Accumulator was back behind its curtain, even before taking my place on the stool, I blurted out, “Dr. Luven, last week was amazing.”  I paced around the room without looking at him, as if talking to myself,  “After what occurred here, especially in the Accumulator and then in your office, well first of all I am embarrassed by that and what I did to your pants and want to apologize; but then when I went back to my room, and though I tried to talk with my fiancé, you know Lydia, and even show her what happened, Helga, her roommate told me she was busy writing a paper about Orgonomy and wanted to include in it everything that happened to me; and though I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about that or anything else that goes on between you and me, I was so excited that I couldn’t restrain myself, though I know I should have.  Still I told Helga, do you know about her from Lydia, she’s a neo-Freudian, but in spite of that I told her everything on the telephone even with her boyfriend listening on the extension.  I supposed it was OK to do that since he’s a pre-med too and will be studying to be a shrink, I mean a psychiatrist, at NYU.  And even with him there I told Helga about what I experienced and she took notes and told me that Lydia was going to use them in her paper; but in spite of that, I need to be honest with you, I didn’t care because I feel certain now, after just two sessions with you, based on what happened last week, that when I see Lydia again, I’ll be able to get her there--‘there’ is how she describes it.  You of course know what I mean since that’s what your practice and your whole life are all about—getting there, and that she’ll then agree to get married.  And so I don’t know how to thank you enough for all that you did for me; and . . .”

“Sit down right there,” Dr. Luven interrupted, cutting me off and pointing at the stool.  I was taken aback by how stern he sounded after all the good news I was sharing with him.  “Some good things did happen last week, that I will grant you,” he said, “but there is much, much more to accomplish; and we have very little time left to us.  I do not want to waste any of it by having to listen to any more of what you have to report.  Frankly, it is not helpful.  Not helpful at all.  Actually, quite the contrary.  

Bioenergetics is not about talking—I leave that to the Freudians,” he sneered, “including the so-called ‘neo’-version.   Here we work on the mind through the body.”  Feeling chastised, I began to deflate and slumped on the stool, self-conscious that my posture might be regressing into its former question-mark configuration.

“I do not believe in or work miracles” he continued, “in spite of what some would say about me, but I do believe in hard work.  Relentless hard word.”  He paused very briefly and said, sounding very clinical, “Now, please again, take off your clothes.  But you can this time keep on your briefs.  I need to look at your body as we do our work.  And I do not want a replay or what happened the other day.”  I thought I saw the inkling of a smile, which eased my sense of upset; but he quickly suppressed it when he noticed that I had detected it.

I did as I was directed, this time stacking my clothing on a side table since Dr. Luven emphatically told me not to put them on the bed.

“Stand over there, close to the light.”  I did as he said and moved to the corner of the room where I took my place by the standing lamp near the cot.  He put on his glasses, huge black-rimmed bifocals, which magnified his gleaming black eyes.   “Good.  Right there.”  He approached me and stood about a yard away.  The top of his electrically-charged head reaching to no higher than my rib cage.   I was near the shuttered window, but it still let in a draft and I began to shiver.  “You recall how I told you from my initial examination of the blockages in your body that there was evidence of your being cut off from many of man’s most basic feelings?”  I began my familiar nodding, in part to generate some body heat.  

“Good.  Happiness and sadness, joy and love, anger and of course sensuality, yes?  You remember?”  I did and so indicated.

“Last week we began to deal with sensuality, with some promising outcomes—about which you appear to be very pleased with yourself.”  I shook my head as if to contradict him.  But he ignored me and said, “Today we will commence an even more difficult task—the release of anger.” 

He sensed that I seemed puzzled by that, as if I had said, “But that’s not why I am here, is it?  I thought it was to release my Orgastic Potency and that I had made a pretty good down payment on that last week?  Why then are we talking about anger?”  Of course I said nothing.

He moved even closer to me.  So near that I could feel his breath warming my chest.  He tipped the lampshade so that more light poured onto my upper body, and without so much of a warning with his hands he began to explore my torso.  First he inserted them into my armpits; and as I attempted not to squirm, he palpated what I assumed from my pre-med studies were my lymph nodes; then raising his hands to my shoulders, he ran them down the length of my arms, pausing at seemingly significant intervals to squeeze them, kneading my bi- and triceps as if searching within for knots or evidence of what I imagined to be blockages. 

When satisfied that he had detected whatever it was that he was seeking, he slid his hands toward the center of my chest, working them, when they met, one atop the other, down the length of my sternum, thumping here and there not unlike what my childhood pediatrician had done whenever I contracted the croup.  He was, though, unlike my childhood doctor, not interested in whatever the echoes from my lungs might reveal about infections lurking there, but rather, I suspected, was probing for places where the physical manifestations of tension might reside. 

And when he arrived at the base of my rib cage, at the site of my tenth rib, just above my floating ribs, in Latin, the costae spuriae, the false or spurious tenth rib, behind which my diaphragm was sheltered, at that most critical of orgonomic locations, where I knew from both Dr. Luven and Lydia the most powerful blockages were often hidden, there he truly went to work. 

His powerful yet nimble fingers rapidly explored every centimeter of my belly, moving first in tight circles from side to side across my quivering flesh, pressing in here and there.  Then he crisscrossed my stomach in a pattern of long diagonals that bisected my abdomen, which if he had left tracks might later have revealed that they had inscribed there the shape of the mystical pentagon.  But about that, since there was no lingering evidence, I of course could not be certain. 

He next worked his fingers well up under my ribs, as if seeking to grab hold of the diaphragm itself in order to, with his own hands, feel and measure its rhythmic expansion and contraction--to assess the quality of my inhales and exhales.  This was so painful that, try as I did, I could not stifle a scream; and to control the bolts of pain that rocketed through my body, I stood as high up on my toes as possible without toppling over, hoping that perhaps that would alleviate the pain or minimally signal him to relent.  But he pressed on, plunging in even deeper among my organs; and to calm me, said, “We are almost there.  This is very good, very helpful.  You will see.  It is painful, yes, but soon you will appreciate all that I am doing for you.” 

All I could think as I gasped for breath and while perspiration engulfed me was that the best way he could help me would be to leave me alone, let me get dressed, send me on my way, declaring me cured.   Or, if not cured, at least as having fulfilled my obligations to Lydia.

But just as I was about to pass out from a combination of hyperventilation and agony, with one hand he reached into the pocket of his tee shirt and took from it what looked like a marking pen.  He put the capped end in his mouth, bit into it, and pulled it open, all the while moving closer to me and holding onto to my lowest rib with his other hand.  He spit out the cap and it rattled across the floor.  “Here,” he said, “right here.  This is what I have been searching for.”  And with the marking pen, he drew a two-inch long black ellipse right beneath where he was still clamped on to me.  “This is the site we will attack today.  As if we are an invading army.  Right there,” he jabbed his index finger into the demarked enemy territory, “Where much of your pent-up anger resides.”

I yowled like an alley cat, which startling him, causing him to twitch reflexively and thereby at last release me.  I stumbled backwards and fell onto the cot, panting.  “Good,” he said, “sit there for a moment.”  I was dying and he considered this “good”?   “We need to talk for a few moments.”  I was soaking wet and gulping for air, remembering that just a short time ago he had mockingly said that he didn’t believe in talking, just “working.”  I was quickly losing my remaining respect for him, for the Great Man, but was happy to have his hands off of me.  Every minute of talk would bring us closer to 3:40 when this final session would thankfully end.

“I have found much of your accumulated anger, hiding there, right there,” he jabbed me again, staining his finger in the still-drying ink that was running down into my navel along with the pooling sweat.  “The body is a remarkable thing,” he said in a dramatic hush, “both in its power and beauty yet also in its capacity to deceive and destroy.  One part divine; another fallible and, yes, at times bestial.  It allows us to experience the ecstatic, the sensual, of course, and to transcend, while at the same time endlessly reminding us of our baser, carnal nature, our capacity to unleash evil.  It is all written there, across your body.  I’m afraid,” he sighed, “like some cosmic joke.”  And then I thought I heard him mutter, “This swindle of a life.”   I covered myself with my arms concerned that with his marking pen he would continue to scrawl all over my body, circling everywhere the somatic evidence of my fallibility and carnality. 

“We will now proceed to do battle with that deceiving part, right there!”  He attempted to jab me for the third time but I was ready for him this time and contracted myself, armadillo-like, into a defensive ball.   Seeing that, he roared with laughter, “You see, you see.  How the body cringes to protect its defenses.  To hide its infamy.  But we will overcome that.”  Pleased with himself, with his self-proclaimed intrepidness, he clapped his hands together with such force that they emitted a thunderous sound so violent that it rocked me back on my haunches. 

“And so we begin,” he sang out as he sprang toward me with his eyes ablaze.

I pushed myself across the bed so quickly and forcefully that I slammed into the wall.  The leather absorbed much of the impact.  I pulled my legs up to my chest to protect myself from further assault and said, with more vigor than I imagined myself capable, “Begin what, Dr. Luven?”

This startled him, freezing him in mid-leap.  “To of course unblock the anger,” he responded and added in a quizzical tone.  “Isn’t that what we have been discussing?”

“That’s what you have been talking about.  Not me.  There has been no discussion.”  Where was this resistance to him coming from I wondered?  Was it because I was beginning to find his theories and methods suspect, was it coming from the pain that still wracked my innards, or was it again the product, as he would probably say, of more “avoidance”? 

But whatever its source, I pressed on, continuing to surprise myself, “In fact,” I asserted indignantly, “I’m not angry about anything.  At least not angry in the way you talk about it.”  He stood there looking at me skeptically, not saying a word, waiting, as shrinks always do, for me to tangle myself up.  Which I preceded to do.

“Yes, there are some things that annoy and bother me.  But they are little things, really small things like my parents always pressuring me about my grades or telling me which of my friends they dislike or Lydia only wanting to visit them once a month, which also upsets them.  That bothers me I’ll admit, but it doesn’t make me angry,” I almost sneered, “not angry by your apparent definition.”  He continued to stand there, silent and smiling, staring at me with his arms folded across his chest. 

“So I don’t see why you keep saying that I’m all knotted up with anger and that suppressed rage is at the heart of my problem.  My problem, again to be honest with you, has been to get Lydia to be satisfied.  And after what happened to me here last week I’m convinced I can do that; and . . .”

Again, he cut me off before I could finish my thought and said, gentler than I would have imagined considering the circumstances, “As much as I would prefer not to, it is usually unnecessary, it does look as if we do have to spend some more time talking.  But that is all right,” he looked at his watch, “We have that time.”  He turned away from me to roll the stool over to the bed.  He sat down on it and leaned toward me.  I remained pressed against the wall with my legs still in their defensive position.  He smiled softly, “Occasionally even Reich had to talk.”

I didn’t say a word, suspecting that as with all therapists he would wait me out.  I was determined to say nothing.  The clock was ticking and in only twenty-five more minutes the session would be over and I would be free of him.  But, unexpectedly, he began, “The diaphragm, as you know from your studies, is controlled by the Phrenic Nerve, yes?”  I did not nod but he continued without pause, “What little we know of the etymology of phrenic is quite revealing.  It is from the Greek and means both heart and mind.  From a time when the heart was thought to be the source of both thought and feeling.  Though today we know better, this concept, this intuition of the ancient Greeks is still important.  It, as you know,” he was, I felt certain, manipulating me by including me in this way, by pretending that I was not just a pathetic patient of his but a peer, perhaps even an emerging medical colleague.  Though tempted to be thus seduced, I managed to resist and simply stared back at him, not averting my eyes, knowing that psychotherapists read signs of weakness or strength, and I was attempting to radiate the latter, from body language such as one’s ability to unwaveringly hold a gaze.

“As you know,” he continued, easily maintaining my gaze, “the Western tradition that the mind and body are separate entities, or biological functions has been successfully challenged by not just Reich and his students.”  He knew I would know that he was here making reference to himself.  I did not however give any signs of acknowledgement while holding my breath, knowing there were only about twenty minutes to go. 
“There have been many experiments, again not just by Wilhelm, yes, that show the inseparability of consciousness, physiology, thought, and emotion.  That they are in fact one.  There is more and more evidence of this kind, no, from the latest studies of the brain.”   He tapped his prefrontal lobes, the neurological source for human motivation, which I was drawing upon with all my will, so much so that 

I could almost feel my synapses sparking.

I knew he was right about that and suspected that I probably did give some subtle sign that I was about to begin to nod back at him.  I do think, though, that I must have successfully intercepted that because he modified his tone still further in reaction to my own lack of responsiveness. 

If at the time I had been in more control of my own raging emotions, I would feel more secure now in saying that he, incredibly, seemed to began to beseech me, “We have spend intimate time together, haven’t we Lloyd?”  I didn’t move.  “Last week, at our last session, as you were saying earlier, something remarkable happened.  Am I quoting you correctly?”  At that I broke down and gave him one full nod of my head. 

“If that is true,” he leaned further forward to peer even more deeply at me, “and if from that and from your own studies you know of this mind-body continuum, and from your experience in the Accumulator where you reported that you did see the Energy, yes, though you were not certain of its color . . . ”

“It might have been blue,” I blurted out.  “As I told you, I’m color blind.”  What was I doing, engaging him, after all my, until-then, hard won restraint?

“Yes, you did tell me.  I of course remember.”  He reached out and, though I twitched reflexively, took my hand in his, “So what would be wrong about trusting me again?  We have very little time left,” he glanced again at his watch, “Maybe no more than twenty minutes.”  According to the clock on his desk it looked to me more like maybe seventeen minutes.  He ended sessions very promptly, even in mid-sentence.  I had been counting on that.  “Although my next patient cancelled so if we need it we can have more time today.”  At that I inhaled so much saliva that I began to cough and choke.

“Let me get you some water,” he said, jumping up.  Which he did, from a pitcher also on his desk.  He stood by the bed and, for the first time, in spite of his size, since I was slumped on it, he towered over me.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’m feeling better now; but I can’t stay longer.  I have a make-up organic chemistry lab I have to complete.”

“I understand; you told me you haven’t been able to study since our last session.”  I was surprised by that as well—that he had remembered.  “But before you begin to get dressed let me make one last appeal to you.  I want to show you before you go, to demonstrate to you, and also to do some more work with you, I want you to see and feel, especially feel, even more of this somatic connection to our emotional life.  OK?” 

I looked up at him, I suppose now in a way that indicated I would grant that appeal.  He had, after all, been careful to say “our” and not “your” emotional life.  “So please, again stand up.  I suspect the pain from the examination has subsided?”  It had.  “Good,” he said as I uncoiled and got to my feet, though resuming my shivering.  “Please now, turn to the bed.”  I did.  “And on it you will find that old tennis racket.”  I had in fact been sitting on it.  “Please pick it up.”  Again, as previously, I did as instructed; there could not be more than ten minutes left so I did not feel I had again only succumbed to his spell—I was simply going along with him, counting down the time. 

“Not that way, you will not be playing tennis,” though my back was to him, I felt certain he smiled at that, “So hold it in both hands like with a bat,” which I did.  “Ach, yes, like that.”  I couldn’t begin to imagine what would be next. 

“And now, it is very simple, I want you to use the racket to strike the bed.”

“To what?” I asked, twisting to look back at him.

“Just to hit the bed with it.  Nothing more.”

“Once?”

“Initially, yes.  To see how you do.  To see what you might feel.”

So I did as he instructed, raising the racket to just above my head and swinging it down toward the cot where it thumped against the mattress.

“Excellent.  Did you feel anything?”

“Nothing really.  What should I be feeling?”

Not answering, he said, “Once more then.  This time please do it more powerfully.”

Which I did, giving the bed a good slam.  So much so that I felt the force of the percussion jolt up my arms, into my shoulders, and from there down to my chest. 

“If you can, I now want you to do that three consecutive times, each time with more force, all right?”
Without further encouragement I began, not knowing what had gotten into me, to beat the bed ferociously.  By the third swing I was gasping for breath because the cot’s resistance made this hard work.  I was sweating again.

“Finally,” he said, with a hint of excitement “since we are almost there,” I noted that reference to there, “we can end after you do it six more times, with each stroke just as hard of the last one.  You will do this for me please?”

“Yes,” I panted without hesitation.  And even before recovering from the previous three swings, I attacked that bed with such fury that I thought I would shred its threadbare mattress.  But this did not stop me because whatever force I was imparting to the bed was being transmitted right back up into my body with such a reciprocally equal-and-opposite reaction, a living demonstration right out my study of mechanics in physics, that by only the second strike the pulses moving through my body, and there is no other way to adequately describe this, had moved to the very center of my being, attacking it with such precision that all feeling became focused right there at the site of the oval Dr. Luven had inked on my diaphragm.

And by the sixth stroke, I was so captured, actually intoxicated by what I was doing that I raced right passed what should have been the conclusive swing, the one that would have released me forever from Dr, Luven’s care, that I lost count and totally gave myself over to battering the bed. 

Between the explosive percussion of the racket on the mattress, I thought I heard him in the background humming to himself.  It sounded like something from a Schubert string quartet I had heard in my sophomore music appreciation class.  But I could not be sure because I was deafened by the blood pounding in my ears.

In spite of the thunder in my head, did I somehow still manage to hear Dr. Luven ask, “What about your parents?  Is there anything about them that makes you feel anger?”  Or was I imagining that? 
And did I scream as I struck the bed with enough force to rock me back onto my bare heels, “I hate it when they make me feel I am their possession.”  Slam. “When they tell me that they are living their lives for me.”  Slam.  “When they list all the things they have denied themselves so that I can have a different life, a life unlike theirs.” Slam. “I hate them when they then make me feel guilty about this. Telling me when I do well it is because of all they have done for me.  All that they have sacrificed for me.”  Slam. 

“Gut,” I might have heard Dr. Luven say.  And did he then ask, “And what about Lydia?”

I did at this, even if imagined, smash the cot so hard that the mattress exploded into a shower of ticking.  I hardly paused to notice.  “I hate her too with her ‘getting there’ and her perfect orgasm!  The last time she made me fuck her so hard that my cock bled.”  Slam.  “And of course she didn’t come, that frigid bitch.  And she was so mad at me.  At me!”  Slam.  “That she wouldn’t talk to me for a week.  To me!”  Slam.  “Me, with my bloody cock!”  Slam.

“I think that is enough,” Dr. Luven, I am sure, said.  “You now know, you have demonstrated, above all you now feel the lessons, the truth of Bioenergetics.” 

But I kept hammering the bed with the racket.  I couldn’t care less about Bioenergetics or Orgone Energy or Reich or Luven for that matter.  I continued to flail away, screaming, “Shit!  Shit!  Shit!”  The mattress was in shreds.  I was ironically getting there.

“You need to stop now, Lloyd,” he insisted, “You have completed your work.”  From his tone I felt understanding and, was it present, love.  I, though, kept striking the bed, but with lessening intensity.
But when he added, “Your time is up.  The session is over.  You have to leave,” he was now sounding very different.  He was again being his former clinical self.  How could he, I thought, after all we had gone through together?  After the gentle talk; the seeming compassion; the perceived colleagueship; and, yes, the touching—there had been that too. 

In that instant I realized I had, out of weakness and self-deception, misattributed his behavior.  I had been taken in, duped by his well-honed analytical techniques, mistaking them for concern and affection because of my insecurity and self doubts.  I had succumbed to the tricks of his trade that were so craftily designed to take advantage of someone insatiably needy.  Someone just like me.

Though I was disgusted, more with myself than with him, I still allowed him to embrace me when he moved to take hold of me.  Because it seemed, I hoped, that he wanted to restrain as well as cradle me.   From this, for at least that moment, it appeared that perhaps my suspicions about him might have been ill-founded—maybe he did in fact care about me, that he was being compassionate because of what I had suffered. 

And so, as he held me, I ceased striking the bed and, taking advantage of being in his arms, sobbed uncontrollably, watching as my tears dripped down into his tangled hair.

He, though, quickly untangled himself from my wet clutches and handed me my clothing.  Embarrassed now by the nakedness of my body and by the flow of emotions that were so evidently, somatically connected to it, proving all of his theories, I hastily pulled them on and, without looking at him again, ever again, turned to leave.

“Wait,” he said to my back, “There is one more thing.”  I didn’t move; I just stood there facing the door.  “Should I mail my bill to your dormitory or to your parents’ apartment in Brooklyn?”

Without looking back at him, I shouted, with considerable terrestrial energy, “Go fuck yourself!”   And slammed the door so hard that, in spite of its padding, I heard what I was certain was the glass-covered picture of Wilhelm Reich shattering on the floor.

*    *    *

What now to do about Lydia, I thought, while sitting in the subway as it thundered its way north toward Columbia.  I would have to tell her something about my third and final session with her Dr. Luven.  There could be no avoiding that.  After all, I had been indiscrete when blubbering about my previous session to her roommate, and I was sure Lydia had incorporated what I reported in her psych paper, so how could I this time say nothing, claiming client-doctor confidentiality?  This in spite of the fact that Lydia never told me anything, anything at all about her own sessions.  My times with Luven, though, were considered, by agreement, to be “ours,” and thus were open to her scrutiny.

By the time the train reached 96^th Street, I was in such turmoil that I bolted to the street even though the College Residence Hotel was still fourteen blocks away up on 110^th Street.  Which was where I knew Lydia was waiting.  That was the arrangement—for her to be there to receive me, with or without open arms, after I completed my end of the bargain. 

I was particularly stressed about what I would tell her about the body-work I had done—the bed beating and what it had opened up.  I was all right to fill her in in considerable detail about my talking with Dr. Luven, if I could represent it that way, as talking together rather than just listening to him lecture about things like the limitations of Western thought and the linguistic roots of phrenic.  Lydia had an interest in psychoanalytic theory and was taking a course on Greek drama that semester.  Thus I felt I would be all right with the mind-body stuff and the Greek etymology. 

I could even take the risk of telling her some of what came out about my parents, though not of course how they were angry with her for not wanting to visit them more often than once a month.  But I could not even consider telling her about the bloody cock business or my having accused her of being a frigid bitch. 

So I needed those fourteen blocks to think things through and get my story straight.

I raced along, leaning into the wind that sheared down Broadway after hooking south off the Hudson.  But as soon as I realized I hadn’t as yet figured out how to approach Lydia, I slowed down to allow myself enough time to come up with a scenario that would satisfy her and at the same time keep me out of further trouble.

I assumed she would not sit still for too much talk about the talking part of the analytic hour.  I knew this from the little she had revealed through the year about her own work with Luven and, from her, on occasion, practicing a version of his craft on my body.  She had done some of her own poking around in a few of the same hot spots he had probed in an attempt to treat me “on the cheap,” as she had described it, suspecting that I would never agree to submit myself directly to his ministering. 

Once when we were having sex, in full flagrante delicto so to speak, Lydia tried to grab hold of my now professionally-explored diaphragm.   After my third session with Dr. Luven, I realized that’s what she was attempting.  I understood, after my time in the Accumulator and from the results of beating the bed, that she had, on her own, in that way, been wanting to attack some of my blockages and thereby redirect some of that stored anger into my orgastic performance.  

Perhaps, because she lacked Luven’s training and experience, all she managed to do was inflict such excruciating pain that I had literally passed out on top of her; and as she struggled to extract herself, she inadvertently rolled me off the bed and onto the floor where I landed with such unconscious dead weight that I broke my nose and needed to go to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital to get it repaired.  It was not much fun attempting to explain to the young and beautiful nurse-in-training what had happened to me—she was unable to stifle her giggles as the blood from my nose dripped down onto one of my best shirts.

Therefore, I would have to be prepared to tell Lydia something at a minimum about beating the cot with the racket.  Maybe I could get away with just telling her I did it but nothing much happened.  But I just as quickly realized that that might not work because the next time she went to Luven for a session of her own he probably would consult with her about what had really transpired.  I needed, then, to tell her enough to provide me with the cover of plausible deniability.  Maybe I should say that I discovered that there is in fact some anger bottled up in me, things from my childhood like my parents always wanting me to get short haircuts or wear short itchy tweed pants even though my friends had moved on to long ones and how that made me feel like a baby.  Things of that kind.  And that, thanks to Dr. Luven, I had gotten a glimpse of these repressed feelings; and he had said, or at least implied, on my own, without any more of his treatments, I could continue to discover more anger and in that way exorcise it. 

But then again, I thought, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to suggest a comparison between Luven’s methods and those of an exorcist.  In any case, if I shared this much with Lydia, maybe she would feel I had fulfilled my side of our arrangement; and if she double-checked about me with Luven, whatever he would tell her would confirm that I was telling at least a version of the truth.  Or, sad for me to contemplate, he might sigh, pointing out to her that what I had reported to her was as much of the truth as I was capable of perceiving and recounting. 

Then, and maybe then, I could do a better job of satisfying Lydia, possibly as soon as I got back to my room where she was eagerly awaiting me, and that this would make her feel better about me and would convince her to agree to proceed with the wedding.  We needed to get to that too.

Feeling thus that I had at least an adequate plan I again picked up my pace and after nearly getting run over by a careening taxicab crossed 110^th Street and raced up the stairs to my room as much out of desire to see Lydia as to avoid the likelihood of getting stuck in the elevator, which half the time jolted to a stop between floors.   I was too charged up with a new kind of energy to risk that.

I was so breathless and aquiver by the time I got there that I could barely get the key into the lock and was surprised that Lydia, who was just inside and had to hear my attempts, out of concern and passion, didn’t rush to unlatch it.  Wasn’t she as eager to see me as I was to see and embrace her?   But happily there was no time to pursue that thought further since I was quickly able to get the door open and plunged into the room full of enthusiasm to tell her the story I had so carefully scripted. 

“You’re not going to believe what happened today,” I burst out, “at Dr. Luven’s.”  She stood in the dim room, at the window, with her back to me and was revealed only in alluring silhouette.  “It was amazing, Lyd, just how you told me it would be.  How it’s all about the body-work.”  She didn’t acknowledge my presence; but I had a head of steam and raced on, “Of course I wanted to avoid that, the body-work, just as you suspected, so I tried to get us talking, you know, psychoanalytic style.  Classic avoidance.”  She began to stir but still did not turn to me.  “He did though tell me a little more about the mind-body continuum but I was eager to get to work, as you know he describes it—as work.” 
While remaining at the window, Lydia stamped her foot on the floor.  It startled me out of my streaming narrative.  I also thought I heard her say, “Shit!”

I was as much confused by that reaction as about why I had so immediately subverted my own well-rehearsed plan to tell her as little as possible, especially about attacking the sites of my repressed anger.  But there I was being so revealing about what really went on in Luven’s office.  I suspected that the next thing I would be doing would be to tell her about what I had actually said about my parents—but still not, of course, anything I had said about her.  And here I thought my reporting about more-or-less everything would please her, make her feel good about me; but there she was stomping her foot and cursing.  Which she again did.

To avoid having to ask about what was going on with her, in truth seeking to ignore whatever it was that she was feeling, I pushed along with my report—“You know that bed in his office, Lyd?  I’m sure you do.  He had me go over to it and take off all my clothes, actually most of them, and after he found out where all my inner anger was pent up and drew a circle around it with his pen, which at first, to be honest with you I thought a little strange, he had me beat the bed with an old wooden tennis racket.  I also thought that was weird; but since I had this agreement with you I did what he told me to do; and after whacking the mattress a few times, harder and harder, all that anger and rage began to pour out.”

I checked to see if this was getting to her; if she was beginning to feel better about me.  She, though, stayed put looking out enigmatically onto Broadway, but at least she didn’t stamp her foot again or do any more cursing.  Thus encouraged, I continued, “As I said, it was amazing, what came out of me, just from beating that bed.  To tell you the truth, Lyd, I didn’t realize how angry I was about so many things.  About my parents too.  And not only about little things like haircuts and itchy pants.  I’m talking about some pretty heavy stuff.”  I looked at her tentatively, “You know what I mean?” 

I paused since I needed to have some reaction from her, to know how she was feeling about what I was revealing.  I didn’t want to go much further without some sign from her that she understood, that she empathized with me since she too had had similar sessions with Luven, perhaps she would even share some of her own experiences with the cot and tennis racket.  I had to know if what had happened to me, which I was now recounting, was what she wanted to hear or was it making matters worse between us.  So I took a chance and asked, “Lyd, are you . . . ?”

As if shot, she wheeled on me and, though the light was behind her, and none of the room lights were on, I could still see that her eyes were blazing.  “I can’t fucking believe it!” she exploded.

“I’m sorry, Lyd, I assumed you wanted to hear what happened today with Dr. Luven.  It was my last session and I thought you’d be happy to . . . . “

“Happy?  Happy?  I don’t give a shit about your Dr. Luven and his stupid Orgone Box and tennis racket.” 

To say the least I was shocked beyond speechlessness.  She was talking about her Dr. Luven, not mine, the “Great Man” as she always referred to him, the person to whom she had insisted I go in one last attempt to save our relationship, to learn from him how to bring her to fulfillment.  And here I was reporting back to her that it had worked—he had identified my blockages, they had been successfully attacked, I had wept in his office, I had even had an erection there and ejaculated all over him.  Beyond that I was also all set to try it on her.  What more could she want from me?

Again I tried, saying, “But Lyd . . . .”

“It’s so typical of you,” she spat back, “to think that everything’s about you.”  She resumed stamping her foot.  She was wearing steel-toed construction boots and I was worried about the people living on the floor below.

I shook my head, “Not at all.  I was only trying to . . .“

“Well stop that ‘trying’ and listen for a change, will you.”  I signaled that I would by moving toward the desk and sitting on the chair, looking up at her as she stormed around the small room, stopping on her second circuit to kick over the wastebasket. 

“I can’t begin to tell you how she makes me feel.  I’ve been involved with her for two years; but today was the end, the last straw.  I loved her and thought she loved me.”  Her tone had softened and she began gently to whimper. 

Though I should have gotten up and tried to comfort her, I instead sat there so stunned that, as if in a cartoon, my mouth dropped open. 

Until then I had always thought of Lydia as heterosexual.  Totally so.  Incredibly so.  But this?  When I recovered from my initial shock at this confession, a thought flickered through my mind--maybe this has been the source of her problem with me.

I stammered, “I didn’t know, Lyd.  I’m so sorry.  Everything is becoming clearer now.  Have you ever talked about this with Dr. Luven?  I mean worked on it with him?  I think he would be quite helpful with this kind of a problem.  As I understand it, isn’t it also all because of Orgone Energy?  It’s displacement or redirection or something like that?”

“I can’t believe you,” she stamped, no longer crying.  She was again the familiar Lydia, “You’re such an asshole.”  I think I might have smiled at that anatomical reference.

“You’re right, sorry.  I don’t know what I’m talking about,” adding under my breath, “As usual.” 
But I continued to sit stolidly at my desk while Lydia resumed her pacing.  And as I slowly began to get used to the idea that Lydia was a lesbian, I must admit that I felt some relief.  She was right—it wasn’t about me.  It was about her!  I knew, of course that this would probably get in the way of the wedding plans, that is unless Dr. Luven could work one of his famous miracles.  But if not, so be it—I could tell my parents about her or maybe, better, make up some kind of less scandalous excuse.  And when they were being apoplectic about needing to put the marriage on hold, I would slip into the conversation that I wasn’t going to med school.  They would be so upset about the wedding that they probably wouldn’t even notice.

With some hesitation I asked, “Have you, Lyd, have you worked on this with Arthur?”  From my chair I was leaning toward her, attempting to hold her in my gaze.

“How could I?  It just happened today.”  She was back at the window. 

I thought, incredulously, that while I was beating on the bed at Luven’s, at her insistence, she was out trysting, cheating on me with her girlfriend.  Who knows, maybe with another modern dancer.  But I was, I amazed myself to find, actually more amused by this than angry.  “Well, maybe it’s a good thing.”  I slipped into my liberal mode—after all, the world was changing, becoming more tolerant and permissive.  I had even participated in a few Civil Rights marches.  In fact, one right there at Woolworths, on Broadway, protesting their treatment of Negroes in the South.  So why was it such a big deal being a lesbian? 

So still in that tolerant mode, I said, “It’s OK with me, Lyd.  Everyone has to find out who they really are and attempt to lead an authentic life.”  I had been reading the French Existentialists in Lionel Trilling’s class and living authentically was one of their dogmas. “Nothing wrong,” I began to choke on my words, “with, you know, being a lesbian.”

“I can’t believe you,” she screamed, “You’re such a moron.  Here I had a fight in class today with Martha Graham and all you can talk about is authentic-this and authentic-that bullshit.  You’re useless.”  

She was standing by the bed and kicked it so hard that it jumped off the floor.

Again my mouth dropped open.  So Lydia was not gay.  I stammered, “I, I didn’t know . . . I thought that . . .”

“Well stop thinking then.  You were never very good at that anyway.”

“With Graham herself?  I know you take classes in her school but with her?”  That seemed impossible.  “Isn’t she like a hundred years old?”

“She’s only seventy,” Lydia said, her voice dripping with contempt, “And she not only still conducts classes, master classes, the ones I’m in, thank you, but she also performs.  If you had been paying attention to me, rather than jumping on my body every minute, you’d know this.” 

This charge hardly seemed fair, considering who in fact did most of the “jumping”; but I restrained myself, still wanting to be helpful.  “So what happened, Lyd?”  She didn’t respond.  “You actually had a fight with her?”  That too was incredible to me—Lydia had a fight with Martha Graham herself, a true immortal?

“I told you about that too.”  I did not in truth know what she was referring to but I nodded back at her as if I did.  She turned her back to me again and said, “It’s about her next concert.  At City Center.  Where we saw Merce last year.”  I nodded some more even though she wasn’t facing me, thinking perhaps she could see my reflection in the window.  I wanted her to know I was not only listening but was also being empathetic.

“Today she told me, that bitch, that she was putting that suck-up, Mercedes Simpson in the company.”  Once more she stomped on the floor.  “And not me.  For Clytemnestra, of all things.    She’s reviving it.  It might be the last time Martha performs, I should say stands around preening on stage since she can barely move any more.  Wrapped to disguise her sagging body in a bunch of scarves and veils.  The old bitch.  I was born to be Iphigenia.  Not that Mercedes tramp.”

I kept nodding in her direction and emitted only, as Lydia’s roommate had done when she was getting me to tell her all about my first session with Luven, “Uhmm.”

“I even studied Aeschylus’ version this term in Greek drama.  So I’m prefect for the company.”  She growled, “That Mercedes can’t even read.”  And she added malevolently, “She’s such a slut!” 

Lydia kicked at the bed again but missed it this time, losing her balance in the process, and as a result gracelessly tumbled onto it.  She landed so hard, hitting the back of her head on the wall with such force, that my Columbia pennant came loose and fluttered down onto her.  In a rage she smacked the mattress ferociously with a clenched fist.

I couldn’t help noticing how ridiculous she looked, bouncing up and down on the bed out of frustration, with the banner crumpled across her lap.  But, trying to remain objective, I continued to maintain my poise and said again, “Uhmm.”

Lydia began to shake her head back and forth so violently that spittle flew out of her mouth and dribbled all over her leotard and the pennant.  She gasped, “That Bitch . . . Martha . . . That slut . . .  Simpson . . .”  With each name and curse she slammed her fists on the bed, each blast harder than the last so that my pillows began to bounce in the air launched by the trampolineing mattress.

I didn’t moved, still attempting to maintain eye contact, as much transfixed by her full-blown tantrum as by my desire to read her body language and, thereby, also attempt to help her.  In that spirit I began to pose, “So tell me, Lydia . . .”

“I’m never going back there . . .”  She broke off and began to cry again, which this time quickly became deep sobs as she continued to pound the bed.

“Where is that, Lydia?” I asked with as much compassion as I could muster, which was difficult for me because I was surprised, at that delicate moment, by something very strange and disturbing that was beginning to happen to me.  Something I am more reluctant than at any previous time to reveal.  Something to this day about which I am both ashamed and mortified.  But I must, in spite of that try . . .

All the while that I was attempting to be there for her, to truly hear her, to do all that I was capable of doing to help her through this desperate crisis, one which was tearing at her heart and which was releasing, should I say, unblocking so much of her pent-up anger; all that while, as I sat there at my desk, but turned to her, trying to hold her gaze, all that time, as I leaned toward her in an act of compassionate caring, I was, I must force myself to confess, I was getting the largest, hardest erection I had ever had.  Yes, I know you are curious, even more tumescent than the one I acquired the previous week as I sat in the Accumulator.

But still, in spite of my pleasure and simultaneous discomfort, I attempted to keep my body leaning toward her, to signify my desire to be close, to show sincerity but as a consequence crushing it.  I one more time tried to reach out to Lydia, “I understand, Lyd, that you won’t go back to Martha.  From what you say it is clear that she is a bitch.  I agree with you.” 

At the mention of Graham’s name, Lydia began to use both fists on the mattress, with such power that she began to bounce on the springs along with the pillows and cushions.  “And that Luven too.  I’m never going back to him.  That quack!”  This reference to him only increased my, yes, excitement and the size of my . . .    

But she was in such distress that I hoisted myself, literally that was what was required, out of the swivel chair and clumsily and painfully shuffled toward her, thinking, once I dragged myself there, I would sit down beside her and maybe cradle her in my arms while at the same time restraining her from beating the bed.  So she could get control of herself.  But, glancing surreptitiously at my watch, I also realized it was getting to be time for me to begin to make my way over to the organic lab where I needed to complete my assignment.  I had, thus to bring this session to some kind of closure.

It had grown quite dark in the room; but still, when Lydia raised her head as I inched close to her, with my crotch at her eye level, she hissed at me with even more venom than she had expended toward Mercedes and Martha, “Get that thing away from me,” she screamed, pointing at my exploding trousers, “It’s the most grotesque and disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

If possible, the looming sight of it intensified her fury and her assault upon the bed, which did not abate as the phone began to ring.  The unexpected sound jolted me.   “Don’t answer it,” she shrieked.
“I have to.  It could be the technician calling to tell me the make-up lab has been cancelled.”
“You are such a shit,” Lydia yelled.  “You and your stupid pre-med business.”
But since it might have been an important call for me, I began to turn back toward the desk where it continued to ring.  A bed cushion cracked me in the back of the head.  “I can’t believe you.  A phone call is more important to you than me.”  Another pillow, missing me, slammed off the desk lamp, tipping it onto the floor, where the bulb shattered.  My erection began to deflate.

The ringing ended just as I got my hand on the receiver.  At the same moment the answering machine clicked on.  I had set is so that I could hear whomever was leaving a message as a way, while studying, to screen calls.

It was my father.  His voice modulated by the cheap instrument.  “Son, it’s me, dad.  Are you there?”  I reached again to answer; but Lydia, who had leaped from the bed, had jumped up onto my back, wrapping her arms around my throat and her legs around my waist.  From her unexpected weight I fell backwards and locked together this way we crashed onto the bed.

“I guess you’re not,” my father’s voice continued, “so I’ll leave you a message.”  He was talking very slowly and deliberately, not used to leaving messages. 

I unsuccessfully tried to wrestle loose from Lydia, who was extremely strong and muscular from all her dance training.  “This message is from your mother and me.”  Since I had never heard him say anything like this, anything that sounded so ominous, I redoubled my efforts to extricate myself.   But could not.  Still entangled, we slammed into the wall together.  My reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night crashed down on top of us.  “She wants you to know that it’s all right if the Lichters will not allow us to invite anyone else to the wedding.”

“The wedding again,” Lydia snapped, “I can’t believe any of you.”  We were rolling back and forth in a knot of arms and legs.

“Your Aunt Madeline,” my father’s disembodied voice went on, “says she can’t come to the wedding.  Which is fine with us.  Your mother, you know, never really liked her.”

“Who needs her,” I could hear my mother saying in the background.

“I hate Madeline,” Lydia panted.  She was beginning to weaken, and I managed to twist myself out of her clutches.

“But ask the Lichters, when you tell them about Madeline, if they can add shrimp cocktail to the menu.”

“Pick up the phone will you,” Lydia at last screeched, “And tell them to send out the fucking invitations.” 

With that the tape ran out, and I instantly regained my erection.