Intensive Therapy Read online

  “Really? How?”

  “You’re all grown up! And you seem so much better than the last time I saw you.”

  “I hope that means what I think it does.”

  “What’s that?”

  She tilted her head slightly. Her throat felt dry. “That you like what you see.” She removed her jacket and placed it on the couch. The fantasy became more graphic. She hoped Jonas would want to ravage her as much as she wanted him. She imagined being enfolded by him while she maneuvered herself on top of him.

  Victoria moved to the part of the couch closest to Jonas and leaned toward him, reaching for his hand. “I want to get caught up with you,” she said. “Let’s talk about us,” she said lasciviously.

  69

  Talk about us, talk about us, Jonas thought. One look at Victoria’s face, and he knew he’d never seen her that way. His temples and scalp felt prickly and his insides quivered like when he was a hormone-crazed adolescent. Victoria had always been attractive, but this felt different. This felt animal.

  She’s wild today, scary wild. Stay with it; stay with the feelings. You can do this. Just let your thoughts and feelings go, Jonas told himself.

  He could smell Victoria’s perfume. An aura radiated from her hair’s reddish highlights, like heat waves over asphalt on a scalding day. With his genitals about to explode, Jonas struggled to reflect on what he was feeling.

  Give in to the moment. Enjoy the feeling. Let the fantasy come to mind. Don’t fight it. Just let it be.

  Jonas pictured stripping Victoria, derriere and legs first, bending her over the couch, coming at her from behind, grabbing her wildly swaying hair, penetrating her as deeply as he could over and over. The fantasy made him weak in his knees.

  He started to speak but stopped and inhaled deeply. The sensation made him think of flying.

  Floating. Soaring. Flying. Breaking free. Something unexpected came to mind: the scene between the two girls in Starbucks months earlier, with the pretty girl in pewter earrings whom he imagined as his daughter. Images of Victoria and pretty girl merged in Jonas’s mind. They became one and the same.

  Daughter? Is this what Gracie will look like in thirty years? Jonas thought, imagining his daughter all grown up. Gracie. The child who threw her arms around my neck. Jonas wondered how the pretty girl’s father would react to seeing the boy with the dark brown hair creeping closer to his daughter. Jonas became that boy. He pictured himself making out passionately with the girl, dry humping her until he came.

  Jonas scanned the office ceiling. One of the overhead lights had burned out. Stay with the feelings of Victoria and me. Still, he went back and forth between Victoria and the pretty girl.

  I’m old enough to be her father. Old enough to be her father? Whose father are we talking about? The girl from Starbucks? Gracie’s? Victoria’s?

  A bolt of insight hit like an electric shock.

  It’s about how Victoria sees me unconsciously: the handsome, strong father she longed for as a child. With her, I’m the man I always wanted my father to be: worldly and potent. What a pair we are! A matched set. No wonder our chemistry is so strong. The forbiddenness has to do with her being my patient, my first analytic daughter. Incestuous feelings for my daughter! Victoria’s repressed sexual feelings for Morris. How trite. How—true.

  Then a second shock: There’s something more going on. Victoria’s trying to live something out. Or relive something. What is it? Maybe she’ll talk about it.

  The elapsed time since anyone had spoken was less than a minute.

  Jonas composed himself enough to talk. “What are you thinking?” he inquired gently.

  “I’m in room 802 at the Carlyle.” Victoria grasped Jonas’s hand and pulled him toward her. “If we walk fast, we can be there in fifteen minutes,” she said brazenly.

  “What?”

  Victoria maneuvered herself even closer to him. She stared at the bulge between his legs and reached for his zipper.

  Jonas withdrew instinctively. “Don’t do that!”

  “Let’s not pretend anymore, Jonas,” Victoria panted, grabbing for his belt. We’re both grown-ups. I want you so badly, I can taste it.”

  Jonas scrambled to his feet and started to back up, but his desk stopped him. “Victoria, I said, ‘Don’t.’ I mean it.”

  “Don’t what?” exclaimed Victoria. She grabbed a sharp letter opener from his desk and menaced his bulging trousers. “What’s that? A banana?”

  “I’m your doctor, Victoria. My job is to understand your needs, not give in to them. Your job is to put your fantasies into words, not action.”

  She glared at Jonas. “I know what I want right now.”

  She began unbuttoning her blouse.

  “Wants and needs are not the same, Victoria. You’re a beautiful woman. I am attracted to you. I don’t deny it. If we knew each other in another context, it might be different, but that’s not how it is. As for your thoughts and feelings, our job is to talk them out, not to act them out. Anything that touches you today will be through words, not actions.”

  Victoria dropped the letter opener and stared at it in dismay. She turned to Jonas. “So you are the dashing professor Lorraine warned me about. Are you enjoying playing with me?”

  “This is not a game. Something important is happening here. It’s about how you see me and what it means.”

  “What about that?” said Victoria, pointing at the tumescence between his thighs. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m turned on.”

  “By me?”

  Jonas laughed. “Is there someone else here I should know about?”

  “I want you to want me.”

  “I do.”

  “So why not—?” Victoria halted.

  “Because I don’t give in to every impulse. And neither should you. Like when you tore into Martin.”

  “You sure know how to spoil a mood. This is so degrading.” Victoria wrapped her jacket around her. “You, the handsome psychoanalyst whose patients fall madly in love with him. Me, throwing my hotel key at you like some pathetic groupie after a Springsteen concert.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?”

  “I’m your doctor.”

  Victoria dug her fingernails into her knees. “Now what am I going to do? I’m confused. I need you to make sense of this. Please don’t say you won’t see me anymore.”

  “Who said anything about that?”

  “What a mess I am. What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Do? We do what we always do. We’re going to talk about what happened.”

  “That’s it?” Victoria shuddered.

  Jonas felt split in two. The sex fantasies about Victoria and the pretty girl felt so real that he could hardly wait to get home and go at it with Jennie like a twenty-year-old. Meantime, the rest of his mind had switched into analytic mode. “There’s a lot to discuss.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your Carlyle fantasy, to begin with.”

  “You expect me to talk about that?”

  Jonas adjusted his clothes. “It would be good for your therapy,” he said wistfully.

  “We’ve been here before,” Victoria said. “Haven’t we?”

  “I was just thinking that,” Jonas said. “That last day in Philadelphia when you told me to do my job.”

  Victoria wiped her face with her sleeve. “This is it, isn’t it, Jonas? Our day of reckoning. It had to come.”

  “This is the way it has to be, Victoria.”

  They stared at each other intently for a shared moment, looking deeply into the other’s soul. Jonas waited.

  “It was such a nice fantasy,” Victoria said. “Just us. You and me and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Like the rest of the world didn’t matter.”

  “Veuve Clicquot? You don’t drink.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.” Victoria’s right hand traced circles on the table to her side. “I just thought of something. When I was
little, my father’s friend, Mr. Brendel, took us out to celebrate when one of his horses won a race at Saratoga, and he ordered champagne in a green bottle with an orange label. That’s how I remember the name.

  “Daddy wore a dark blazer and a pink shirt with a brilliant white collar and a white tie clasped with a pearl tie bar. He looked so handsome. My mother got mad at him.”

  “What did it have to do with you?” Jonas asked.

  “I was little. Only five or six. Daddy picked me up in front of the whole restaurant while he toasted Mr. Brendel. Everyone made such a big fuss about how pretty I was. I tingled with excitement. Bing Crosby, the movie star, was there. He said what a pretty girl I was and that if Daddy wanted me to be in pictures he should let him know. His breath smelled like disinfectant. Later on, someone said Crosby wasted his money on racehorses that never won.”

  “So your mother got jealous.”

  “She was always jealous. That’s why she hated me. I’ve told you that before.”

  “About the jealous feeling?”

  “It intensified the tingling.”

  “I’m not surprised. What about your father?”

  “What else is there to tell?”

  “How you felt about his handsomeness. What it felt like for him to treat you as though you were more special than your mother. How tingling with excitement connects to your fantasies and feelings about handsome men. I’m glad you think I’m handsome, but so is Martin.”

  Victoria laughed bawdily. “I never told you this before, Jonas. When I saw you with Jennie at the pizza joint that time, I felt like I was burning up. I almost jumped into bed with Bucky that night. So, guess who bought me the lingerie I wore the first time I got laid?”

  “Your father?”

  “He didn’t know what he was getting me, but he knew I had a date that night and he told me to get something special.”

  “He knew, but he didn’t want to know.”

  Victoria readjusted her blouse and reached for her jacket. “I’m not sure I like where this is going,” she said.

  “It’s heading straight from room 802 at The Carlyle to the master bedroom at 1912 Rittenhouse Square South.” This was Jonas’s chance to connect Victoria’s desire for him with her forbidden feelings about Morris and Martin. Gregory was a part of this, too: Gregory, whose boyish charms Victoria clung to lest she realize that the objects of his adoration would soon be females much younger than she, and that the feeling between Gregory’s and his admirers’ legs would be very different than adoration. It was one of those pivotal moments in therapy, like the pregnant pause before a symphony’s finale.

  Victoria gazed across the room at her Robert Frost poem. “It’s complicated. Isn’t it?”

  “It usually is.”

  “You changed my life, Jonas,” Victoria said. “I wouldn’t be me if it weren’t for you.”

  “You changed my life, Victoria,” Jonas echoed. “I wouldn’t be me if it weren’t for you.”

  “We could have been so good with each other. Don’t you think?”

  “We already are.”

  “I bet you’re as good on the couch as you are behind it.”

  “It’s time you had that in your life, not just in your fantasies.”

  “I used to feel that way when I was young. Remember that person? I miss her. Can you help me get her back?”

  “You’ve got it in you already. You felt it not ten minutes ago. You need to allow yourself to feel it with your husband.”

  “I like the sound of that!” Victoria said.

  “He will, too. I promise.”

  “And just how is this erotic explosion going to take place?”

  “Give me a second to think it through.” Jonas smiled. “Here. I’m going to muse out loud. First, I’ll send you and Martin to the best damn relationship counselor I’ve ever met: Eileen Bremen. She’s head of the Marriage and Family Center in Philadelphia. After you and Martin work on your communication she’ll send you off to a marriage encounter weekend.” Jonas laughed out loud. “By the time you and Martin are finished there you’ll be panting for each other like wildebeests. You’ll be the hottest dark-haired woman Martin’s ever met. You won’t be able to keep your hands off of each other.”

  “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” Victoria said.

  “Maybe so,” Jonas said. “But to get the job done right, you’ll need more than a friend.”

  Victoria walked over to the picture window. The scene reminded Jonas of the final day of her therapy in Philadelphia.

  She said, “Why does someone like me need a ‘you’ in my life?”

  “It’s in our nature. We weren’t made to go through life alone. Nobody’s life is real unless we share it with someone who matters.”

  “Are you lonely with Jennie?”

  “Not at all. She knows me like no one else. I’m grateful to have her and our children. Same for my father-in-law and my brother. And you. I’m a lucky man. I love a lot of people.”

  Victoria broke into a broad smile. “I love you, Jonas. I always have.”

  “I love you, too, Victoria, from the moment we met. I didn’t have words for it back then. But here we are now, and there’s a lot of unfinished business.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Take a few moments to catch our breath. After that, we need to get your meds straightened out. I know you stopped taking them; the pharmacy called.”

  “You know,” Victoria said, “everyone says that medication for bipolar disorder either makes you gain weight or lose your mental sharpness. Or you lose your sex drive. I don’t want any of that.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Jonas replied.

  “Are you sure that won’t happen?”

  “Years ago we had fewer medications to choose from. Now we have excellent mood-stabilizers that don’t make people gain weight or lose their mental edge. About the sex drive….”

  “Yes?”

  Jonas laughed. “You don’t think I expect you to take something that would get in the way of what we’re working on, do you?”

  Victoria blushed.

  “Do you?” Jonas teased.

  “No. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “Good. Let’s go to work on the Martin issue. You take him for granted. I said it before, but my timing was off.”

  “I knew you were right. I just wasn’t ready to admit it.”

  “You accused Martin of being like your father.”

  “Why do you think I said that?”

  “Because of conflicted feelings about sex.”

  “Why is this coming up now?”

  “For one thing, your children are getting older,” Jonas said. It’s hard for parents to deal with their kids coming of age sexually. Bipolar or not, Melinda’s probably got a lot of your sexual drive in her.”

  “Oh, God. I remember those years,” Victoria said.

  “And don’t forget Gregory. Give it a few years and the girls will be fighting to get their hands on your son.”

  “Parenthood. I suppose you have to deal with it, too, Jonas. Don’t you?”

  Jonas smiled. “Oh yeah. Meanwhile, don’t forget: Martin loves you very much.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Masculine intuition. If he didn’t love you deeply, he wouldn’t have been so hurt. But you have issues with his handsomeness.”

  “You’re right, Jonas. You’re right. Me of all people. Who would have thought it?” Victoria looked troubled.

  “We’re not going to run out of things to talk about anytime soon, if that’s worrying you.” Jonas looked at his watch. “I’ll meet you back here in a few minutes. Let’s get going on it today, while The Carlyle fantasy is still fresh.”

  Jonas ushered Victoria into the hallway and pointed her toward the restroom around the corner. As she disappeared, he remembered the ferryboat metaphor she had used to describe life’s journey. Minutes later he heard sounds in the distance that reminded him of his last day on Dr. Fowler’s couch
.

  Bawm bibawm bum bah, dah diddle dada, dah diddle dada, Bawm bibawm bum bah, dah diddle dah daaah.

  Faint at first, the sounds fell into waltz time. Could it be Invitation to the Dance? Jonas smiled as he heard Victoria’s footsteps approaching, picturing her and Martin’s steamy romance.

  The lights dimmed three times and soft chimes announced intermission was over; it was time for act two. Though his and Victoria’s dance would continue, the ballet would end in a Schone-Braun pas de deux.

  About the Author

  Jeffrey Deitz grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was a prize-winning instrumentalist at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Between undergraduate and postgraduate years at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania, Jeffrey graduated from Baltimore’s University of Maryland Medical School, where he received an award for academic excellence. He spent the last half of his senior year conducting neuroscience research at The Johns Hopkins Medical School.

  After psychiatry and psychoanalytic training in Philadelphia, Deitz and his wife moved to Connecticut, where he entered private practice, contributed widely to the professional psychotherapy literature, and conducted a series of seminars about the theory and practice of psychotherapy. He also participated in the psychotherapy research group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and taught psychopathology at a New York psychoanalytic training institute.

  In 2007, Deitz turned his attention to wider audiences when he began publishing in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and other media outlets on topics including sports psychology, sleep deprivation, and the power of psychotherapy. He also contributed regularly to The Rail, the New York Times blog about horse racing, one of his lifelong interests.

  In addition to his writing and psychotherapy practice, Deitz is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Frank Netter School of Medicine of Quinnipiac University, where he lectures second year medical students on diverse topics.

  Deitz and his wife JoAnn live in Norwalk, Connecticut. They have two grown sons who live in Brooklyn. Intensive Therapy: A Novel is his first book.

  Acknowledgments

  No one writes a first novel without a village; or in my case, a town. I am very grateful for the many people who helped take Intensive Therapy: A Novel from inception to publication.