Netsuke (2 page)

3

I LEAVE CLUES BEHIND both purposefully and inadvertently. Inadvertently because I do not wish to be discovered; I do not wish to hurt Akiko. There is a self within me who longs, at least from time to time, if more and more sporadically, to live a simple, tender life. Or, if this is beyond my powers, to engage the interstices with discretion, without harming Akiko. Yes. Without bringing her to harm.

Purposefully
because I long to be discovered as I always have, since infancy, to receive the punishment that is my due. To risk annihilation. I court annihilation.

Deception is tiresome. It begins to seriously leech my resources, my strength, my powers of intellect, my time. And because there is a self within me who would crush Akiko’s gentle neck. Who knows? Perhaps one day we will die together in a conflagration. Our own conflagration in a world that everywhere is burning.

Recently I made trouble for myself with a shopgirl. Such women are shameless; they are under the erroneous impression that other women, women like Akiko, are not. One will not disabuse them.

She could be my daughter, this overheated wench worthy of Wycherley. (She’d play Lucy, the buxom lady’s maid.) Neurotic, cummy, self-aggrandizing, a braggart. I should know better. The new girl Friday to my wife’s framer. My clairvoyant Akiko hated her on sight, whereas I couldn’t take my eyes off her. We eye fucked straight away. The transaction ended badly, with Lucy spilling coffee on Akiko’s portfolio. For this she was fired, if only briefly. Later in the week she called my office and begged me to intercede in her favor. As Akiko—in an unprecedented temper—had taken her business elsewhere and so could not know, I did as I was asked. Lucy triumphant, therefore, a thing I could not help but profit from. Her little deed amused the cad that dwells within. It should have ended after an afternoon’s burn between two evildoers, but I was hooked. Encounters such as this enliven the days. And so the thing persisted.

Lucy was like a spoiled child; we played hard together. She teased me, she needled, she longed to see our house, Akiko’s and mine. She hungered like a little cat for a taste of the fish set out upon the master’s table. And so as soon as Akiko was away—clear across the country—the cats did counterfeit domestic bliss. (I should add that, if Lucy’s transparency amused me, her needling also hardened me against her. Within the interstices, her place would always be secondary.) I knew our setup would floor her. She would be envious; she was. When I saw the green cinders leaping from those malicious eyes, I feared I had, once again, gone too far. (As when fucking the little blonde who does our taxes.)

We tumbled around the house like pandas. I spun her like a top. I rolled her about this way and that. We managed to despoil every room and knock over a small red lacquer box, although the house is sparely decorated. I knew enough to keep her out of the studio, but when she saw a large collage suspended above our bed, she raged:
The bitch doesn’t deserve all this!
At that instant I could see her a decade down the road: flushed, fighting fat, bitter.

She needed soothing. I made her a kir, got out the snacks, and then, at night’s fall, took her to the marriage bed.

Lucy was mollified by this ultimate betrayal; like Scrooge McDuck, a rainbow, a pot of gold spun above her head. I let her dream although I planned to dump her; she was—I could see it—pretty crazy, possibly borderline psychotic. I feared—and rightly so—an unregulated nature. It would be a job to manage the affair. I began to worm my way out of it.

As we cuddled and whispered together into the night, I revealed my sorry life; the doctor’s life is not his own. Clients all in danger of collapse—or worse—from one moment to the next. The midnight calls from the hospital, fire department, or police. I made it clear our time together was possible only because of an unusual synchronicity: Akiko’s opening in New York and the departure of a client, recently terminated and who had left for Australia where he intended to start up his own practice devoted to a thing he knew from the inside out: the misuse of infants and children by those who are depended upon for protection.

Lucy began to weep, poor, winsome brat! In her early teens an uncle had been inappropriate. I told her she was fortunate it had not happened sooner.

“Not sooner!” she surfaced like a porpoise from the foamy sheets. “So
later
is O.K.? Fuck that! Fuck you! I can’t believe you said that!”

Yet when I made to lick her tits she sighed and yawned, needful of a pre-dawn nap. (It is she who broke the shell; I am sure of it!)

The minute Akiko returned, she knew something was amiss. She barely touched the take-out sushi, artfully presented, but roamed the house mumbling that it
looked odd,
it
felt odd.
She wondered if it had actually shifted, if ever so slightly, on its foundations. Had there been a small earthquake? A torrential rain? And then she found the shell. A precious shell from Indonesia, spotted and pronged; a thing I’d never paid any attention to. It was a rarity, and now it was broken.

For a time Akiko wore an irritated look; a furrow appeared on her lovely forehead. I must admit it turned me on. The oddest things do.

4

THE PRACTICE IS CONTAINED within two home cabinets situated at the entrance to our property, but my clients do not know there is a house beyond, nestled in the woods; Akiko’s studio, as well, is invisible. Perched upon the edge of a small ravine, both appear to soar above the canopy. From within our rooms, Akiko notices and points out to me the deer, the snowy owls, and seasonal hummingbirds.

The home cabinets are well rooted to the ground by a stone path and garden, all of Akiko’s design. My wife is addicted to perfection and adheres to a dogmatic system both ancient and alien to me. And beneficial. In terms of my need to dissemble, she is my greatest gift. The cabinets are impeccably set out. They are spare and they are superb. Each has its own waiting room. The cabinets both open to a hallway that leads to my own private library and office.

One of the cabinets I call Spells. I cannot enter it without my heart beating faster. The other I call Drear. If Spells is devoted to the pleasures of transgression, Drear belongs to all the rest: Lutherans, a defrocked priest, a wafer-thin old maid, a psychopath who has bungled more surgeries than he has toes, the retired night watchman who squanders his pension on whores and whose wife of forty years is suing for divorce. There is also the CEO of a local company undoubtedly responsible for my city’s dramatic number of birth defects, a college professor—the most tedious of the bunch—who drones on and on about a lost inheritance and his wife’s dismal affair with the family dentist. (There was once a young scholar I took a fatherly interest in and who managed to elicit real tenderness.) (Do not think me incapable of tenderness.)

Sometimes a client will move up from Drear to Spells, even after many years. There was an actress once, as rageful as a bloody axe, who over time was soothed and then began—it seemed miraculous—to flourish. One day I saw how beautiful she had become, how vigorous, how eager for the world and its delights; how desirous, also, of transgression.

I invented an excuse, claimed Drear needed to be reconfigured, and moved her to Spells. There I allowed her to seduce me: “I always,” she told me on her knees, “wanted this.” The affair triggered a shift in her expectations and charisma; she landed a major role downtown. That was ten years ago. And if her roles are now less glamorous, she still invites me to opening nights.

Spells is the theater where my clients and I break all the rules. And this under the banner of Mindful Subversion, Convulsive Beauty. What happens here is stunning, somehow always unique, if orchestrated. I never forget that I am dealing with people who, despite their determinisms, their needful tenderness, their pride, can at any moment decide to kill me or call their lawyers. And so Spells is oiled with solicitude and sweetness and the infinite capacity that seems to be mine to convey that each transgression is unprecedented.

To assure this impression, I have at times and after a period of months or weeks, revealed a previous violation many, many years before when I was green and still vulnerable. Such a revelation convinces the most skeptical of my good intentions, my passionate interest in them, and the anomaly our love affair represents. The lady in question, now a mistress, will assure me that my secret is safe with her, as safe as she believes she is with me. The affair remains circumscribed within the process of recovery.

I do not accept gifts—apart from the little love gifts, so like those of high school girls, I simply cannot refuse. I explain that because our lovemaking is an extension of our work together, the fee will be the same. In this way I become my client’s whore. Yet I always manage to act professionally. My infatuations are in the service of knowledge. My clients love this! We fuck in the stellar radiance of knowledge and love. I am enamored of my profession.

The women are intelligent, sexy, neurotic, funny, inventive, feisty, sprightly, and they are in need of me. They do yoga, tai chi; they are in fine fettle and in great shape. They play tennis; they go to the sporting club. They get massages and go to botox parties. They are as sleek as seals.

The men … this is more complicated.

5

BACK TO AKIKO.

My wife sells her curious work for astonishing amounts of money and so receives the bounty of my friendship without ambiguity. I do not “support” her and yet I do provide security, a sense of belonging, of having a place in the world. We are, after all, a couple. It never occurs to her that, as she cooks glue in her bower, I am extending the meaning, the expectations, the boundaries, and even the vocabulary of the therapeutic relationship. At the end of a long day, as I enjoy the raw oysters she has provided for my benefit, the Fanny Bays I especially appreciate, I think, I always do:
Why tell her? Why torment her?

And yet there are those times I would grab her by the hair and spit it all up in her face. Her pleasure in our life sending me into a rage difficult to contain. In these moments I must drop a clue or else explode.

I tell her about a female patient’s sexual interest in dangerous men; a beautiful woman, milky skin; a strawberry blonde. I watch for signs. My wife puts down her fork and grows very still.

I tell her about my concern for this patient’s safety. I see Akiko’s nostrils flare. My wife is gentle, rational. Coolly she says, well, of course you are concerned. This is what your work is all about. Your deep concern. For other people.

“But this is different,” I tell her. “She puts herself directly in harm’s way. She has never known anything but rough sex. She fucks in toilets. She’s this beautiful woman and gives blowjobs—”

“Stop it!” Akiko hits the table with her fist. “I don’t!” she cries out, her white cheeks rouged with dismay, “I don’t want to know about patients’ sexual lives! And I don’t! I don’t think you,
goddamnit!
should be telling me this. I’m not supposed to know this!”

I was unexpectedly floored by this outburst, I was shamed. And fearful, also. Dropping clues is always a grave error and so I was quick to soothe her. I agreed that such problems were best kept locked away in Spells.

“Spells?”

“Ah.” I felt dizzy, a delicious feeling of descent into a pool of very deep water. A cooling pool. It was risky, another clue inadvertently dropped. But there was the weight, the gravitas of our decade together, Akiko’s and mine; I felt safe, and so I said: “Spells. My little name for the sessions. The more difficult sessions.”

“Wow,” she said, considering. “I didn’t know. That’s interesting. I’m sorry,” she added, coming to me then and putting her arm around me. “After all this time together and still there is so much I don’t understand. Your work is
strange!”
she laughed, perhaps benevolently. “But. Understand. It’s hard to think about, you know, the women, hour after hour, talking about their sexual lives. I’m not always—how could I be? Up for it. I mean: the knowledge of that.”

I thought about what to say next. The best way to diffuse the moment, to erase the clues. An
apology,
I thought. An apology is called for.

“I am sorry,” I said to her. “What I did was inconsiderate.”

“You’re really sweet,” she said. “I think we need a break. A little time away together.” It was true; we had not been away alone together for well over a year. There was so little time for that, and the risks were enormous.

“As soon as the Practice lightens up a bit,” I told her, “we’ll go away. We’ll go off together.” At once I could see I had hit upon exactly the right thing to say:
we’ll go off together,
I repeated.