(1987) The Celestial Bed (2 page)

‘I’m glad you did,’ said Kile assuringly. ‘But Arnie, what can I do for you in Tucson?’

‘You can get me out of here,’ said Freeberg simply, ‘I remembered something you once said, when I was first moving to Arizona. You said, Why not come to southern California? You said it’s freer country than anywhere else. You said you’d heard of a number of therapists who used sex surrogates in Los Angeles and San Francisco.’

‘Did I? I guess I did. Anyway, it’s true.’

‘I resisted only because Miriam’s doctor in New York had been adamant that Arizona was the best place for her bronchial condition. That was five years ago. Now her doctor in Tucson - I just phoned him - feels she’s better and could fare as well in southern California.’

‘You mean you’d consider moving here?’

‘Yes,’ said Freeberg. ‘There’s no other choice.’ He swallowed. ‘Roger, California is unknown country to me. I need your help. You’re a Californian now. You know your way around. You could be of enormous assistance, if it’s not asking too much.’

‘It’s asking very little. You know I’d do anything I can for you, Arnie.’

‘I’m not rich,’ Freeberg went on. i have everything invested in my clinic here. No big thing getting rid of it, once I have a real estate agent put the building on the market. It’s a valuable property. I’m sure I can sell it in no time at all and come out your way with sufficient money to set up another clinic in southern California.’ He swallowed nervously again. ‘But I do need help. I’ll pay you for your time, of course.’

‘Cut it out, Arnie,’ Kile said with a pretence of annoyance. ‘This is friendship. What are friends for anyway? I’ll tell you what. If I ever run into trouble myself - can’t get it up one day - you can pay me back by contributing your services and loaning me one of your lady surrogates. So you’ve got a deal. What do you want from me?’

‘A promising location in or around Los Angeles. A building I can afford and can remodel as a clinic. I’ll send you details tomorrow. Photographs of the two-storey place I have right now. And I’ll let you know, in round numbers, how much I can afford to spend.’

‘You’ve got it,’ said Kile. ‘Let me start making inquiries right

away. Once I have your specifications and limitations - well, give me two weeks, Arnie. I’ll call you when I have something for you to see. Meanwhile, give my regards to Miriam, and I look forward to meeting that little boy of yours. It sure will be good to see you again.’

Freeberg was reluctant to hang up. ‘Roger, you’re positive I’d be welcome there? I mean, with sex surrogates and all.’

‘Not to worry. I’ll double-check the criminal code, but I’m absolutely certain it’s not against the law. Arnie, this is freedom land. I guarantee it. Now, let’s get going.’

It worked. It went smoothly. Every aspect of the move worked out.

Today, four months later, Dr Arnold Freeberg could sit comfortably in his high-backed leather swivel chair behind the wide oak desk covered with a custom-fitted black felt blotter and listen to the muffled sounds of hammering outside the entrance downstairs. The workmen were putting into place the blue and white sign that read, in block letters: FREEBERG CLINIC. The sign was being mounted over two glistening glass doors that led to the reception area.

Today, too, early this afternoon, Freeberg would be briefing the five new sex surrogates he had selected out of the six he would be using. He wished that his sixth surrogate, his most experienced, the one he had employed in Tucson, could also be here right now. Gayle Miller had agreed to join him, go on with him, in a few weeks, after she had graduated from the University of Arizona. Then she would apply for graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles to get her master’s degree and doctorate in psychology. The imminent appearance of Gayle Miller gave Freeberg confidence. He was certain the new surrogates would be good, but Gayle was a gem — young, attractive, serious, and experienced. She’d been his sex surrogate on all five cases in Tucson and she had been faultless. Every problem male had been discharged to go forward with a normal sex life.

Absently gathering his notes together, notes he had jotted down in the past few days to remind himself of points he wanted to cover in addressing the new surrogates, Freeberg’s gaze roamed around the walls of his spacious office. There was still the pungent, stinging smell of the fresh paint on the walls. The oak wainscot

had been stained deep brown to give it a rich panelled look. Hung from the walls, in cream matted frames, were Freeberg’s impressive panoply of idols: Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Theodore H. van de Velde, Marie Stopes, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

On the nearby wall there was a decorative mirror and Dr Arnold Freeberg’s eyes came to rest on that and on the reflection of himself. Sheepishly he inspected himself - high comb of wiry black hair, somewhat stiff and unruly, thick horn-rimmed spectacles over small myopic eyes, hooked nose, full dark moustache and short beard encircling his fat lips. Fleetingly, closed in by his predecessors, he felt embarrassed. He didn’t measure up to them. Not yet, not yet. But one day soon, perhaps. He believed and he would try.

His eyes moved to the silver-framed photograph on a corner of his desk. His wife, Miriam, attractive in her mid-thirties, and their smiling son, Jonny, a delight. Freeberg became conscious of his own years, his late fortyishness, late to have a first child, but not really, not actually.

Giving his head a shake, he drew his notes closer and tried to concentrate on them. Quickly, he skimmed them, then pushed them aside. He knew them all by heart and would not need them for reference when he spoke to his new surrogates.

He still had fifteen minutes to spare before his five surrogates appeared, and almost as a relaxation he began to review the events of the last four months that had brought him to these moments. He relived those four months in the present.

Within two weeks of Freeberg’s initial phone call from Tucson to Roger Kile in Los Angeles, Kile had finished his investigations and found the location. Not in Los Angeles proper, as it turned out. Los Angeles was too heavily populated with sex therapists, Kile had learned, and furthermore centrally situated properties were overpriced. But following expert advice - Kile had always been a clever investigator, even in law school at Columbia, and although a tax attorney, his knowledge and interests were widespread — he had found the community in which his friend might prosper an hour north of Los Angeles.

The community proved to be Hillsdale, California, a burgeoning incorporated city on the coast highway and close to the rolling blue Pacific Ocean. It was a sprawling city of 360,000. There were

plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists there, but not one sex therapist yet. Roger Kile had been assured, by knowledgeable contacts, that a practice would flourish for any reputable sex therapist who set up shop in Hillsdale with a team of trained and professional sex surrogates. Hillsdale, Kile learned from medical contacts, had more than a fair share of disturbed, troubled, and sexually dysfunctional persons.

After that, Kile found two well-recommended real estate agents, and they quickly led him to four small office buildings that appeared to be possibilities. Freeberg spotted the perfect building immediately, a vacant two-storey construction abandoned by a clothing store chain, and set in the middle of Market Avenue, three blocks off bustling Main Street. After that, everything fell into place rapidly. Freeberg hired an excellent young architect to remodel the vacant building along the lines of his Tucson clinic. Then Freeberg flew back to Tucson with his wife, to divest himself of the old clinic. Meanwhile, Miriam got rid of their ranch-style house, breaking even.

They went to Hillsdale four times in the period that followed. While Freeberg stood by to oversee the remodelling of his clinic, Miriam sought a new house and found a wonderful eight-room one-storey residence about three miles from her husband’s offices.

Immediately, Freeberg began to install the necessary personnel in his clinic. Through an MD nearby, Dr Stan Lopez, a general practitioner that Freeberg had come to respect, Freeberg was able to obtain Suzy Edwards as his personal secretary. Lopez had been using Suzy as a part-time second secretary and knew that she wanted a full-time job. Freeberg interviewed Suzy, a solemn and interested redhead of around thirty. She was eager for the job, and Freeberg had already heard that she was trustworthy. After that he hired Norah Ames as his practical nurse, and Tess Wilbur as his receptionist.

Next, Freeberg sent personal letters to every medical person around the country that he had met at conventions and seminars, announcing the opening of the Freeberg Clinic in Hillsdale, California, and offering intensive treatment and the use of female and male sex surrogates when they were found necessary. While awaiting responses, Freeberg instigated his search for sex surrogate candidates. To obtain applicants, Freeberg wrote personal letters to psychoanalysts in Hillsdale, and to fellow therapists in Los

Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Within a few short weeks he received twenty-three applications from those wishing to become sex surrogates, and even as the replies came in, Freeberg received referrals of patients who were in desperate need of his kind of therapy. From these referrals, Freeberg knew that he would require five surrogates, four women and one man, plus the services of Gayle Miller, who would shortly be leaving Tucson for Hillsdale.

As the surrogate candidates gradually arrived, Freeberg began to screen them, interviewing each personally. Many were short interviews, because the candidates did not qualify. If a candidate gave, for her motivation, that she thought this would be interesting work, she was disqualified. Interesting work was not good enough, not motivation enough. If any candidate showed the slightest concern about being a candidate, or any hesitancy whatsoever, she was eliminated.

The longer interviews were given over to women who were well motivated. There were divorced women with no children living at home, who’d had sexually inadequate husbands. There were women who’d had problems with lovers suffering sexual dysfunctions. There were women who’d seen sexual troubles in their parents, siblings, other relatives. All the candidates, no matter what their previous callings, were bound by a common desire to assist sexually crippled men in becoming fully normal males.

Always in his interviews, Freeberg kept in mind something that a colleague had once remarked: ‘A good surrogate is sensitive, compassionate, and emotionally mature.’ A qualified surrogate was someone who was also comfortable with her own body and her own sexuality. Every female that Freeberg seriously considered, if she was presently unmarried, had to have had a normal sexual relationship, had to know that she was sexually responsive, and had to have confidence in her own femininity. Above all else, she had to burn with the desire to repair the sexually wounded among the male population.

In the end, Freeberg wound up with four highly promising female sex surrogate candidates - Lila Van Patten, Elaine Oakes, Beth Brant and Janet Schneider. Once trained, they would make a perfect group to team up with his soon-to-arrive Gayle Miller.

Freeberg had required only one male sex surrogate. Male

surrogates to work with dysfunctional female patients were not in demand. Freeberg had discovered that a male surrogate did not fit the value system of most females. It was the old nonsense, lingering into the 1980s: if a male had numerous women, he was OK, a cocksman; if a female had casual sex with many men, she had round heels and was a fool. Generally, having sex with a stranger, in this case a male surrogate, was unthinkable by American social standards. Usually women - far more than men -needed time to build toward a satisfying relationship. But this was California, times were changing, a little, just a little. Freeberg could see that there would be a female patient now and then, and so he would need at least one male sex surrogate. In Freeberg’s screenings, a single applicant had stood out. He was a young man from Oregon, experienced, interested in his personal growth, thoughtful, warm, and with a real desire to help troubled and suffering women patients become normal. His name was Paul Brandon. Among the handful of male candidates, Brandon was the one that Freeberg selected for training.

The door to his office had opened, and Freeberg came out of his reverie. ‘They’re here, Dr Freeberg,’ his redheaded personal secretary, Suzy Edwards, was saying. ‘The surrogates you selected, they’re seated in the all-purpose room waiting for you.’

Freeberg smiled and heaved his stocky body to his feet. ‘Thanks, Suzy. Time for the curtain to go up.’

Dr Arnold Freeberg shut down the piped-in music, left his office, and walked briskly to the far end of the all-purpose room - a thirty-foot room that resembled a sparsely furnished living room. Here and there, on the floor, lay mattresses, and at the far end was a sofa facing the five surrogates, ranging in age from twenty-eight to forty-two. They were seated on folding chairs in a semicircle.

With a smile, Freeberg nodded to them, was pleased to see they were all neatly dressed and alert. He knew that they were comfortable - his nurse Norah had already introduced them to each other - but on their faces were expectant expressions.

Freeberg sat down on the sofa, settled back, crossed one leg over the other.

‘Janet Schneider,’ he said as if reading a roll call, ‘Paul Brandon, Lila Van Patten, Beth Brant, Elaine Oakes - I’m so pleased to have

you here. Welcome to the Freeberg Clinic. I am delighted to tell you that you are all, without exception, decidedly qualified, highly qualified, to become valuable and useful partner surrogates.’

He observed their immediate and unanimous pleasure at the compliment.

‘I am going to speak to you today about your training programme, which will begin in this room tomorrow at nine o’clock in the morning. Your training will be entirely under my supervision, five days a week, for six weeks. Only in the final Kages will I bring in outsiders. When we get to penile-vaginal contact, I will require the assistance of four males and one female recommended by the International Professional Surrogates Association in Los Angeles. These will be former patients - or clients, as some call them today — who once suffered their own sexual problems, have gone through full courses of exercises with reputable therapists and experienced surrogates, and have been pronounced cured and ready to deal with their own intimate lives.