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.
