On a clear, sparkling Sunday early in the month of June, a small group of bright and sophisticated young women were seated in a circle on the high roof garden of a doorman building in Manhattan. It was Jennifer Slater’s building, and it was Jennifer’s engagement party for Meg and Dan. As Jennifer’s capacity for preparing food was limited to boiling water, the party was catered. The festivities began at two in the afternoon. By four, most, if not quite all of the invited guests had arrived. About fifty guests sat or stood in small clusters scattered along the length and breath of an extensive roof. The area was fitted with groups of wooden chairs, which surrounded large coffee tables. Each cluster of people, chairs, and tables were separated from one another by a space of approximately thirty feet, far enough in the open air to provide a modicum of privacy to each group. It was the perfect setting for a party, with spectacular views of Central Park and the line of stately buildings that graced Upper Fifth Avenue on the East Side.
The circle of friends consisted of Jennifer and Meg, Hillary and Daryl, and Annie Giraud. With the exception of Annie, introduced to the others by Meg a year earlier and still on the periphery of the circle, the friends had known one another since college, or even earlier. They were familiar with each other’s tics and idiosyncrasies; in short, it was a quite comfortable group of intimates. It was perfectly natural and even expectable that at some point during the party they would congregate and lose themselves in a discussion that, as often as not, would involve men. For the last few minutes the topic of conversation that engrossed the five young women was: why are men afraid of commitment? Annie, the youngest member, happily in her midtwenties, sought information from the one member of the group who wore the mantle of “expert.”
“How did you do it, Meg? How did you convince Dan to commit?”
“It’s a long story,” Meg said in a voice suggestive more of levity than seriousness. “Dan did put up the usual guy resistance. You all know the dreary story—all the crap about needing ‘space.’ Then the answer came to me in a flash—you know, one of those eureka moments. Why not out-phobe the commitment phobe? So I began to ask for more space than he wanted. You see, girls, guys love a challenge. They go for the kind of girl who’s hard to get. The harder she is to get, the more they prize her. After a while I had the poor man in a complete daze. So that’s how I bedazzled him.” Meg deliberately mispronounced the word bedazzled to rhyme with daze.
“But that’s so unromantic. That’s gamesmanship,” Hillary protested. Hillary was the idealist of the group.
“Romance is an illusion,” Jennifer retorted. “It all comes down to power.” Jennifer was the group cynic.
“You’re a cynic,” Hillary said.
“I’m a realist. It’s all about who has the upper hand.”
Annie requested an explanation.
“It’s simple; someone is going to be needier. That’s the person who doesn’t have the power.”
“So why don’t we just withhold sex? That way the guy’s got to be the needier one,” Daryl suggested.
“You withhold sex?” Jennifer said. It was a strictly rhetorical question.
“You know, we never have gotten around to answering the original question,” said Annie. “Which is why men fear commitment.”
Jacques Giraud, long-legged and lanky, stumbled into Harry’s office and marched toward his chair (not the couch) like a man on a mission. Harry was fond of Jacques. In particular he was impressed with the young man’s intensity and how seriously he took the work they were doing together. He was pleased by the obvious influence he had with Jacques, how the young man struggled to absorb the lessons of therapy, which, although not always successful, revealed strong motivation. He liked Jacques’s character; he was not only intense, he was also deeply honest and good at heart. In a world of narcissistic men and women, self-involved and self-aggrandizing—the world that Harry’s profession compelled him to navigate—here was a different sort of human being.
Jacques sat upright in a leather chair opposite Harry. He was so tall his knees were virtually at the level of Harry’s eyes, perhaps partly accounted for by the fact that Harry rarely sat up straight. Jacques arrived with good news. He had just received notice of his promotion to associate professor and his tenure at Rutgers University. Harry offered his warm congratulations.
“You’ve worked hard for this, and you truly deserve it. Even though I know you had your worries, I never actually doubted that they would give you tenure. They were not going to let someone with your ability go.”
“I’m happy about it, of course, but you know, it’s not where I really want to be.”
Harry knew that Jacques had spent his undergraduate years at Harvard and his graduate years at Princeton, and he was motivated to reach higher. “I know that, Jacques, but it’s a significant achievement and a good omen for your future.”
“Well, it’s an achievement. I’ll call it a ‘significant achievement’ when I get to the kind of university I want to be at.”
Minimizing his success was an old, bad habit of Jacques’s, as Harry well knew. “Raining on your parade again? Only a week ago you were fearful of being passed over and having to leave without another position in hand.”
“That’s true. I am very relieved.”
“And Jacques, it’s not Podunk Community College; it’s a state university, and it’s your first tenured promotion. So how is it not significant? Congratulations, man, well done!”
Jacques smiled. “May I change the subject?” he asked.
“No, you may not. I want you to stay with the feeling, ‘Associate professor, tenure, yes!’ At least I’m going to celebrate it.”
“Okay, Harry, let’s open the champagne.”
“Small triumphs are important,” he told Jacques.
“Duly noted, and I do feel happy. But I’ve been thinking.”
How many times had Harry heard Jacques begin a sentence with those words? Harry wished the man would think less and feel more.
“About my relationships with women.”
“Yes?” Harry leaned back in his chair, the fingers of his hands laced together, as if preparing for a long slog.
“I’ve never been close to anyone, not once, not with my stepmothers or any of my girlfriends.”
“You never felt close to Barbara?”
“I suppose over two years there were times … but there was a hell of a lot more propinquity than intimacy. You pointed out how much she resembled my second stepmother, giving me the feeling that I wasn’t her priority, that work, friends, and whatever came before me. Why didn’t I see that? I wasted so much time. “
Harry listened and tried to read between the lines. What was the underlying message?
“Should I have been more direct with you?”
“Why are you always blaming yourself, Harry?”
Actually, he wasn’t. It was a question he could have directed to Jacques.
“No, it wasn’t your job to tell me how to live my life. I just kept right on ignoring what I was feeling, missing the handwriting on the wall, chasing a foolish fantasy that she would eventually come around. My head was up my ass and my brains followed.”
Dr. Harry Salinger, a psychotherapist, looked out the window of his ground floor office as he awaited the arrival of his next patient. The street was empty except for a middle-aged woman walking a small poodle across the way. It was unusual to find things so quiet on a Manhattan street in the middle of a warm sunny afternoon. It was also unusual for Jennifer Slater to be late. As a rule he could rely on her promptness. His thoughts turned to her; he admitted to himself that he looked forward to seeing her and hoped that she would not be too late. Looking nervously at his watch, he realized that her forty-five minutes of therapy were now reduced to just over forty.
He recognized his feelings toward her. For one she was very pretty, and he was too experienced an analyst to believe that it didn’t matter. He pictured her as though he couldn’t wait to see her before him. She would be dressed in tight designer jeans or slacks that accentuated the contours of her long, slender body and ample, well-toned buttocks. He never missed a quick glance at those. They stood out, demanding attention, making a statement.
His fascination left him feeling slightly disreputable, a feeling that he was never quite able to shake. In one of his more self-effacing moments, he’d speculated (to himself, of course) that he had the makings of a first-rate lecher. He reminded himself that sexual feelings were only human, a part of life, even or therapists. He needed to cut himself some slack; a feeling was only a feeling after all. There was nothing wrong with it.
When she arrived, she would be wearing her extraordinarily thick jet-black hair pulled back from her forehead, neatly tied behind by a ribbon and then cascading broadly across the small of her back. Would he call her beautiful? He thought about that. She was certainly unusual looking. He loved her eyes, a shade of gray, or were they actually blue? He wondered why he was having these thoughts now. When he first encountered her some eight years ago, she was just as pretty, but he never gave her appearance a second thought. Of course his wife had been alive then, and perhaps that made all the difference. Were these erotic thoughts simply a matter of horniness, or loneliness, or some other as yet unknown need?
Nevertheless, other pretty women were coming to him who did not engender the same feeling. So clearly there was something else. It’s our relationship, he thought. Over time they had become comfortable with each other, and—especially on her part—quite free. She said whatever came to mind, that little censor that came between the thought and the verbalization of the thought having apparently long since perished. Jennifer had a way of teasing him in a subtle, occasionally not-so-subtle, manner, with just a hint, a suggestion, of possibility. After the death of his wife, Harry had been sexually inactive for years, and it pleased and flattered him that she might entertain, even in her imagination, such a possibility. He was not tempted, but he was titillated. He seemed to need it, although he knew, from a strictly professional standpoint, that it wasn’t a good thing to need anything from a patient except timely payments.
At other times their sessions were like verbal duels. Jennifer could be difficult and combative. At her worst she could be absolutely oppositional, disagreeing with everything he proposed. From session to session his feelings toward her underwent a change. They might be angry or avuncular or sexual. Of course he would never act on the latter. It was also true that he was never bored with her or indifferent.