The Children of Hamelin (21 page)

“That’s beautiful,” she said, “and I really do appreciate it. But I can’t go into something like that without thinking about it. I’ve got to understand my feelings first... maybe Friday at our group—”

I sat bolt upright in bed.
“The Group!”
I yelled. “The fucking Foundation? You’re gonna drag Harvey in bed with us?”

“That’s what group sessions are for,” she said firmly. “To help us understand our feelings....”

“Of all the fucking idiocy! Look baby, I understand my feelings about you and I understand my feelings about.... Ah, shit!”

“You’re not being logical about it.”

“And you’re being too damned logical!”

I sensed her withdrawing behind her eyes as they got cold and calculating. She glanced at the clock. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got an early class tomorrow. I think I better go home now. Otherwise, we’ll just fight all night.”

“Aw for crying out—” I cut myself off. About the one thing, she was right: if I had to listen to much more Foundation crap from her tonight, I’d pop my cork for sure.

So I just lay there in bed stewing in my own juices as she got up and started to dress. Part of me wanted to tell her to get lost, get out of my life, go fuck Harvey Brustein or take on the whole Foundation in a neo-Freudian gang-bang.

But I remembered having told myself that I would go another extra mile for this girl. And I remembered that I
had
broken through her biggest hang-up tonight. And I remembered that our relationship
was
in motion—maybe it was just asking too much to expect her to give up the navel-staring of the damned group cold turkey, without my help.

So when she had dressed, and leaned over the bed, and kissed me goodnight, and asked with a worried frown: “You
will
be at the group?” I smiled nastily and said: “Yeah, baby, I’ll be there. But don’t expect me to hold back anything. I think this is sick and I intend to say so. No holds barred.”

“That’s the name of the game,” she said, just before she left. And left me with a wan, brave, lost little smile.

And how do you turn your back on that, smart-ass?

I just sat back in my seat at the left end of the semi-circle of folding chairs, kept my mouth shut tight and glowered, letting the rest of them work Harvey around like sparring partners. I was trying to build up an effect: I had sat down as soon as I came in, had maneuvered Arlene into taking the far right seat opposite me at the other horn of the crescent, so that the rest of them—Doris, Charley and Ida to my right, Linda Kahn and Rich Rossi to Arlene’s left—were boxed in between us, with Harvey at the apex of our little isosceles triangle. And while Rich bitched about fucking up his sex life, and Charley insisted he was off the sauce and
did not
consider himself a washed-up middle-aged failure, and Ida refused to discuss her sexual fantasies, I just sat there like a wooden Indian staring now at Arlene, now at Harvey, thinking black thoughts and projecting ominous vibes.

It felt almost good. I was in the room purely to sock it to Harvey and show Arlene what a prick he was. It might be his turf, but when the deal came around to me, we were going to play by my rules. In fact, in a way, we were already playing by my rules because my silence and the poisonous looks I was giving Harvey were really getting the animals uptight; the whole group was off-balance and lines of curiosity and hostility were becoming skewed in my direction. It was only a matter of time before the tension-wave broke over me.

Linda Kahn was mouthing some bibble about the ingrained hostility of men caused by the competitive nature of American society, or some such hash of Marx-cum-Freud. The masculine egos in the room were snarling back at her. Arlene was sneaking nervous glances at me every time she thought I wasn’t looking. Any minute now, the shit would hit the fan...

“Now look at
that
over there,” Linda said, pointing at me. “It hasn’t said a word all evening. Just sits there pouting like a sullen little boy.
There’s
your masculine hostility!”

Harvey, perhaps sensing that even the chicks were getting tired of listening to Linda’s dumb bullshit, looked my way and said: “I do notice that you haven’t said anything so far, Tom. You were quite outspoken at the last group; what’s troubling you tonight?”

I smiled my best eat-shit smile. “Sex,” I said. A wave of giggling smirks went through the peanut gallery and we were off to the races.

“That’s a pretty broad topic,” Harvey said.

“It’s a
broad
topic, anyway,” I said with as much crude in my voice as I could muster. The bad-pun groans were music to my ears.

“Is there some trouble between you and Arlene?” Doris asked. Good old Doris!

“Yeah, there’s some trouble between me and Arlene.”

“She threw you another lousy fuck, didn’t she?” Rich said.

Not really meaning it this time, I thought Humphrey Bogart at him, said: “I warned you about your mouth before, creep. I won’t warn you again.” True to form the balless wonder sat back in his chair, pulled in his horns.

“Actually,” I said, “sex really isn’t the problem.”

“Oh yeah, Hollander?” Charley said. “Then why did you say it was?”

I smiled sweetly. “Because I wanted you jerks to get your jollies,” I said. “Got all your dirty little minds drooling, didn’t it?”

“The little boy wants to play his little games,” Linda simpered. “Isn’t that cute?”

“Maybe I should whip my cock out so you can bring yourself off baby,” I suggested good-naturedly. “You can’t come anywhere else, maybe you should try getting yourself off in group. That’s what you’re here for anyway, isn’t it?” And I made a phony move towards my fly.

Linda turned a whiter shade of pale. Ida looked like she couldn’t decide between fainting like a proper lady or daring me to really do it. Arlene looked quite properly aghast but I sensed she was getting a charge out of it, maybe because everyone knew where the organ in question had last been; there was hope for the chick yet. The rest of them, except for Doris and Harvey, did their best to look snide. Doris gave me a look that told me she knew I was playing some game and was mildly interested in where I was going.

Harvey cracked neither a smile nor a sneer; instead he made with the psychiatrist’s pounce. “Do you often feel exhibitionist tendencies?” he said.

“Only in subways and men’s rooms,” I told him, writhing in mock ecstasy. “I can’t help it—something about dirty white tile just turns me on.” It would be interesting to see if I could gross
Harvey
out.

“Come on Tom,” Harvey said humorlessly, “what’s really bothering you?”

“The varieties of erotic response,” I told him. “Aren’t you hip to Krafft-Ebing?”

“Come on, Hollander, stop beating around the bush,” Charley said.

“Isn’t the real question
whose
bush is
who
beating about?” I said.

Harvey pouted slightly. “I really don’t think this deliberate vulgarity is necessary,” he said stiffly. So it
was
possible to gross old Harv out. I filed it for future reference.

“All this... is really my fault,” Arlene blurted out. “I think... I think I really hurt him.”

“Baby, you didn’t hurt me, you hurt yourself.”

“How about letting
us
in on all this,” Ida said.

“All righty. Got your dildo ready, Ida-baby? Arlene and I enjoyed carnal knowledge of each other Wednesday, we created friction in each other’s private parts, we polluted our vital bodily fluids; that is, we fucked.”

“Do you have to be like that about it?” Arlene said angrily, eyes blazing, hands balled into fists. I had finally gotten to her! “Do you have to make it sound so animalistic?”

“Was
I
the one who was animalistic about it?” I said.

Silence. Her lower lip trembled. The peanut gallery shut up; they were beginning to groove behind the show.

“Dig what an animal I am,” I said. “I made love to that girl, dig, made love; not screwed, not fucked
—made love.
All you dirty voyeurs have been listening to her bitch about her sex hang-ups for months. Well, it’s all bullshit. I said it was bullshit last week, but then I thought I was lying to protect my lady’s honor, if the concept isn’t totally beyond you. But this time I found out I wasn’t lying, isn’t that right, Arlene?”

Arlene studied her shoes.

“Go on, tell ‘em,” I said.
“You
wanted this, remember?”

Arlene nodded without looking up. “It... it was beautiful...” she whispered. “I... I really felt like a woman for the first time...”

“What do you want us to do, pin the Congressional Medal of Honor on your fly?” Linda Kahn sneered.

“Just making a point. Which is, that with a Secret I Learned in the Orient, I was able to get her to make love just like a woman. No applause, please. Because it was really a big nothing. Arlene never had a sexual problem. But she
does
have an emotional problem; something’s made it impossible for her to have a decent relationship with a man. Somethings that’s right here in this room....”

“That’s very interesting,” Harvey said, “whether it’s true or not. And just what do you believe the supposed cause of this supposed non-sexual problem to be?” Ah, snideness! Microscopic cracks were starting to appear in the facade of Harvey’s cool.

“Looked in the mirror lately, Harv?” I asked him.

He actually flinched.

“What is this crap?” Charley said.

“Attacking the therapist is a clear—”

“Shaddap!” I roared. “I’m paying for this damned therapy, and I’m gonna get my money’s worth.”

“Let him talk,” Harvey said quietly. “This may be a valuable breakthrough for Tom.”

“Thanks pal,” I told him. “Harvey, how would you react if I called you a castrator, a voyeur, a pervert, a liar, a monster, a cocksucker, a pederast, a Commie, and a faggot?”

Harvey peered at me from behind his glasses as if trying to decide whether a padded cell was in order. “How would you expect me to react?” he said mildly.

“That’s
how I’d expect you to react, Harvey,” I said, mousetrapping him in his own cool. “Are you a human being, man?”

Harvey frowned. What could he say to that?

“Groovy,” I said. “I’m taking your silence to mean you don’t object to being called human. Because if you weren’t human, none of this would make much sense.”

“You call this making sense?” Rich said.

“Back to your kennel, Fang,” I told him out of the side of my mouth. “Let’s run it all back to the beginning. I meet Arlene. We ball once—pretty mediocre. But the second time around, it’s really groovy—real human contact, dig? Kind of thing that should really start something going, right? Right, Arlene?”

“I don’t know...” Arlene muttered, twisting her hands together, looking at the floor. Poor kid. Yeah, I felt like something of a shit putting her through this, but goddamn, she had asked for it. If she was right about the Foundation, I was only doing my duty; if I was right, I was purging the muck out of her head. Either way, it was for her own good.

“The little lady doesn’t know.
Why
doesn’t the little lady know what the beginning of a real thing between a man and a woman should feel like? Has the little lady ever had a meaningful relationship with a man?”

Arlene’s body drooped forward, head practically buried in her breasts. Real touching. But I had worked up so mush nasty momentum that there was an IBM machine where my heart was supposed to be, and it was Arlene who had gotten me into this situation and put it there, and the voice of the computer told me that anything that happened to her in this room was her own fucking fault and I would be doing her no favor by holding back now.

“Dig, so she’s never had a real relationship with a man, is why she can’t be expected to know what it’s supposed to feel like,” I said. “So last Wednesday, I, who have at least had
some
kind of real relationships with chicks, did feel that something had started between us. So to show her how I felt, I offered her a key to my apartment. Now you’d think a girl who had never gotten that far before might be a little touched, moved, excited, happy. But not the little lady—”

“That’s not true!” Arlene shouted, bolting upright in her chair, hands balled into fists. She hesitated, as if looking at herself overreacting; then seemed to deflate like a leaky balloon, and in a little whisper said: “I really
was
moved, Tom... really I was... I still....”

“But you couldn’t so much as accept a lousy key, could you?”

“No....”

“Why wouldn’t you take the key? Go on, tell ‘em.”

“Because... because I was afraid... it was too big a step for me to take without... without—”

“Without hacking it out in this group?”

“Yes.”

Oh yes, I had them in the palm of my hand, I did. They were all hunched forward sucking it up and wondering what came next. And old Harv was leaning back with a little smile, the Great Guru watching his people do his thing.

“Okay,” I said, “you can all take your hands out of your pants folks, because you’ve heard the whole lurid truth about Arlene’s torrid affair with Attila the Hun. So what’s the point of all this except my taking my cock out? One more question for the little lady: would you say that one of the reasons you’re a Foundation member is because you’re trying to do something about your inability to make it with a man?”

Arlene shot me a look of pure hostility. “All right, all right!” she said. “Yes! Yes! You have all the answers, don’t you?”

Harvey leaned forward, took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, replaced them and said: “Just what are you trying to say? You haven’t gotten very far with all this.” Ah, Harvey was getting a bit pissed-off at my playing shrink. Well you ain’t seen nothing yet, Harvey-baby!

“What I’m trying to say is that maybe you can’t tell the cure from the disease without a scorecard. The chick can’t make it with a man till she clears it with her group; she’s going to group because she can’t make it with a man. Isn’t there something vaguely circular in all this?”

“You’re saying that
therapy
is keeping me from having a healthy relationship with a man?” Arlene said. The hostility was gone; it was an honest question.