"Will buzzes in his three o’clock— that is, he buzzes in someone he thinks is his three o’clock but, as announced by her distinctive, staccato ascension of the uncarpeted stairs, it’s the girl.
It’s been three weeks since he terminated treatment with her– since he told her what she has not accepted. Instead, she’s hounded him with messages and voice mails, some polite and beseeching, a few bordering on abusive. She’s even called his home number, spoken with Carole.
An excerpt from Envy: A Novel, by Kathryn Harrison, in Best American Erotica 2007
“You have to leave,” he tells her now. “I’m expecting a patient.”
“I have to talk to you.”
Will inhales deeply, lets the breath out through his nose. “My– we don’t have anything to talk about. We are no longer engaged in—”
“No,” she says, “you don’t understand. I need to talk to you. Please.” The look on her face is one of what appears to be genuine desperation.
“Have you contacted either of the people to whom I referred you?” he asks her.
“No. No, I—”
The buzzer buzzes, and Will pushes a button by the light switch to release the lock downstairs. “My three o’clock,” he says. “You have to leave now.”
“I’ll wait,” she tells him.
His patient starts up the stairs; the girl starts down; as they pass each other, the patient averts her face in the usual manner of an encounter at the analyst’s office: deferential, blind. As Will closes the door behind her, he sees that the girl is sitting on the landing downstairs, rummaging in her backpack.
When he looks out his door at 3:50, she’s reading. “What can I say to help you understand that we cannot continue to work together?” he says as soon as his patient has left the building.
“Please,” she says, coming up the stairs. “Give me another chance. I don’t know why I pulled that shit. I know I behaved badly, but I promise nothing like that will ever happen again.” Will watches her face as she speaks. Either she’s sincere, or she’s an actress with genuine talent.
“It’s best— best for you— to begin over again, with someone else.”
“I don’t want to! I can’t. I swear I can’t. Please!” Will doesn’t answer. If only she’d stop saying ‘please’ like that. Mitch could always get him to do anything if he just said please enough times. Will’s impulse— his determination— was always to even things up between the two of them.
“Please forgive me," the girl says, striking at this vulnerability with the accuracy of a mind reader. “We can start over.”
“Our professional relationship has been compromised. Compromised in a way that would lessen my effectiveness in treating you.”
“But why can’t what happened be part of what we talk about? Wouldn’t that be, like, useful? Useful in figuring out what makes me do these things?” Will doesn’t answer her, and she throws herself onto the couch. She’s wearing a pair of trousers that are, he guesses, a kind of commentary, or protest. Made of camouflage material in which the army greens and browns have been replaced with bright pinks and purples, their legs are absurdly wide, each one sewn from enough fabric to upholster a chair.
“I don’t get why you’re making such a big deal about this,” she says. “You act like I stabbed you or mugged you or something.” Sitting cross-legged, the girl takes off her pullover the way a little boy might, by grabbing the scruff of its neck and dragging it over her head, making her hair crackle with static. Underneath is one of those sleeveless undershirts commonly known as wife-beaters. Her bra, visible through the sheer fabric, looks like the top of a bikini; it’s striped blue and white. She reclines, arms behind her head.
“Please do not lie on my couch.”
“Because I’m not your patient?”
“Yes.” Will turns his back on her, and on the little surge of panic he feels, dismissing it as claustrophobia. Across from his office, someone turns on the light in the dance studio. A few students enter and begin stretching.
Will twists the Lucite wand that adjusts the blind; he turns around to tell her once and for all to go, good-bye, good luck, but what he sees stuns him into silence.
“Put on your clothes,” he says as soon as he’s recovered his voice. “Put them on now.”
Read the rest of the excerpt from BAE 07, or better yet, Kathryn's whole novel!
Susie's Interview with Kathryn Harrison
S: Taboos intrigue because of just how "un-taboo" they get can in real life, while still holding up the mantle of their immorality. Why do you think that is?
K: Well, taboos exist for a reason: to prevent behavior that tempts us and can injure us.
The two greatest taboos are against murder and incest, which are significant, age-old human issues. We live in a violent society— we even condone mass murder for political gain— and because our sexual morés are more limiting than we can tolerate, we have a lot of illicit sex.
Incest is certainly not a rare occurrence. Interestingly, statistics indicate that most murders are committed within families.In other words, it's people who are intimately involved with one another who kill and rape one another. Which makes sense, as we have the strongest feelings about the people with whom we live, and share blood, and while some of those feelings are positive, a lot are not.
The too-awful-to-talk-about-but-not-too-awful-to-do aspect issues
from the failure of taboo to keep lust, or blood lust, reigned in. What
can't be discussed is that failure, because it frightens people— the
fact that they aren't safe because the taboo isn't a sufficient
deterrent
to keep them safe. So it's alright to keep saying "you mustn't do
this, it's a terrible sin," but not alright to acknowledge it's
happening anyway.
S: In your web site biography,
you write that you met your birth father when you you were 20, and a
sexual affair ensued for the next few years, until your mother's
death... with grandparents following not too long after.
It
struck me that he met and cultivated you when you were the the same age
your mother was when he'd impregnated her, and their marriage fell
apart. Was he was trying to finish something, or make something work
that didn't the first time?
K: I'm sure it had a great deal, if not everything, to do with his
very unhappy earlier history with my mother, and with her parents. I'm
not sure if it was completing something, as you suggest, or a way of
taking revenge on my mother and her parents. Or maybe it was the only
means he felt he had of possessing a child whom he didn't raise
himself
and whom he felt had been taken from him. Even before he fell in love
with my mother, both of them 17, he had his own family history that, I
believe, must have warped and damaged him in some ways.
S: Is your father still alive? Have you had the "orphan" feeling as yet? If he's still alive, what about his being in the world still affects you?
K: He is still alive, and while we are completely estranged from each other, and have been for more than 20 years, I am very aware that he exists, and his death will be an occasion of grief.
—Not only the loss of him, but I don't want to lose any future chance to resolve or
explain what unfolded between us. It is, admittedly, a fantasy unlikely to be fulfilled— very unlikely— but still, one I hold.
As for the orphan issue, he didn't raise me, wasn't there for the first 20 years, so I'm not immune to that. I have a piece in an anthology called Only Child, and it's all about that sense of being the sole owner of my history, one no one can confirm.
S: When a woman writes writes about incest— or a vulnerable part of her sexual history—what do you notice about the criticism and review she will attract, as opposed to a man who might write about similar issues? I'm not trying to elicit a feminist party line answer, I really want to know what you've observed.
K: My memoir The Kiss was a controversial book that inspired a lot of acrimony and ranting and a few really venomous responses (mostly from men, but women, too). For better and worse, I'm type-cast as "that woman who wrote about her affair with her father."
A number of reviews of my novel The Binding Chair, which followed The Kiss, responded to the earlier book. The negative reviews of The Kiss focused not on the fact of the relationship, or the crafting of the book, but rather took me to task for choosing to write about incest openly, as memoir. A couple of reviewers who hadn't had the chance to get their licks in when the memoir came out, then were hard on The Binding Chair for reasons that had nothing to do with it. Even reviews of The Seal Wife, which came out much later, typically mentioned the memoir and segued into commentary about that book.
In general, I think male writers are congratulated for coming clean, being honest— about their sex lives, even if it entails abuse— and women are punished for revealing what ladies shouldn't talk about.
One of the reviews of The Kiss actually ended with the words, "Shut up," which I found astounding.The publication of The Kiss politicized me as I hadn't been before. All the slurs— that I'd done it for the money, that I must be a terrible mother, etc.— were so predictable, calling me, in effect, a whore, a woman too fallen to raise her children. It showed me a world to which I'd been blind. I was raised by a very forceful woman— whatever failings there were in my upbringing, feeling marginalized or "lesser" as a woman wasn't one of them. As far as I could tell, women had all the power.
S: In your story, in the scene I excerpted,
we see this do-gooder shrink getting sexually cornered, and succumbing
to his reckless new patient, who seems like she will do anything
without fear, to get her way.
In this scene, it just seems
like "the poor guy" is faced with an impossible situation, that there
is nothing he could do to calm her down, back her off. As far as drama
goes, it's completely convincing, but don't shrinks face this kind of
thing all the time? What are they supposed to do when their patient
says,"I'm going to scream if you don't fuck me?"
K: I haven't been presented with that particular disaster. In writing about it, I wanted to correct or complicate the assumption that it's always the shrink who takes advantage of his or her patient. It may be that shrinks are more often the aggressors, sexually and otherwise— they usually begin from a position of psychic power over their clients— but I'm sure at least some of them have been on the receiving end of trouble.
I like turning things on their heads, so to speak, and Envy has a lot of reversals.Will is more stereotypically "female" in that he wants to talk and talk and talk about relationships, feelings, grief, etc. The most tempting reversal of all, for me, was of course allowing the 20-year-old patient the role of seducer/abuser, while the shrink/father figure is helpless against her manipulation. That's the novelist's taste of poetic justice: taking her own past and rewriting it.
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