With a sigh of regret I closed the Pandora’s box of untold perversions and headed one flight up to seek my China. I was under the illusion that I was on an important mission that would affect the nature of what analysts call the compromise formation, which develops as a patient comes to terms with his inner conflicts. In one sense, I was cutting off my nose to spite my face, since by informing her of the fact that we were missing the convention, I was potentially curtailing the amount of time she would have to spend with me.
I walked down the hallway of the twelfth floor with trepidation. I had heard rumors among the analysts at the conference that China’s grandmother was one of the first Chinese psychoanalysts in Peking, and that her career was cut short by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Being a strong woman, China’s grandmother would not be stopped by the infamous Band of Four, and the type of Lacanian analysis that China herself practiced had its roots, the rumor went, in her mother’s need to conclude her sessions abruptly when Communist cadres appeared at her door and forced her to get back to rooting potatoes.
My knees were shaking as I knocked on China’s door. Undoubtedly, she would interpret my appearance as having a significance that went deeper than a mere scheduling conflict. That is one of the problems with analysis — nothing is ever accepted as having a mundane meaning. I knocked very softly, somehow thinking that China was sitting on tenterhooks awaiting my arrival. (My tendency to believe that the world revolves around me is one of the subjects we had discussed in a memorable one-minute session.) When there was no answer, I realized that I was being unrealistic. I decided that if I was going to knock on her door, I had to really knock. With the edge of my fist I pounded once more. The doors in the hotel were quite thick, in all likelihood purpose-built to muffle the constant ululations of the guests. But when I put my ear right up against China’s door, I could hear the murmurings of CNN. For a moment, I thought that she might very well be seeing another patient. Of course, she could also have simply been relaxing and watching television, though I had a sneaking suspicion that China was a workaholic who only allowed herself to watch TV when she was doing something else. Like many analysts I had encountered, she undoubtedly was very committed to her work — writing papers, attending conferences and teaching, in addition to seeing patients.
As I was about to give up and walk away, thinking that she simply couldn’t hear me over the din of the television, a repressed memory was liberated in me and I recalled that the last time I had been in analysis, I’d rung a buzzer that was located conveniently halfway down the door jamb, near the knob of the door which led into my former doctor’s office. I took a deep breath, searched for a bell and, finding it, rang. I don’t know what I expected. Did I expect China to come wafting across the floor of her suite, flashing her vagina at me as she opened the door? Would I discover an expectant China? Patients always fantasize about what their analysts do in their spare time. In my case, I imagined that China and her beloved Schmucker had ordered up a gourmet meal and that they were dining by candlelight as the full moon cast a magical light over the sand and sea beyond the Copacabana.
When I was a little boy, I would climb into my parents’ bed in the middle of the night when I was awakened by a bad dream. Now I wanted to crawl into China’s bed — not because I was having a bad dream, but because I wanted to fuck her. Even I was surprised by the intensity of these forbidden thoughts. It’s one thing to read about the Oedipus complex in a textbook, but quite another to see it in action. When such transgressive desires stare you in the face, they can cause the kind of guilt that now flooded my brain.
I rang the bell again and again. If I was already on my way to hell, I might as well fly off in a hand basket. If China wasn’t there, I would raise her up from the underworld with an unholy racket and exorcise my demons at the same time. I became convinced that even though she wasn’t in the room, she could still hear the buzzer, wherever she was. I must have been ringing on and off for a good half-hour before China came to the door, wearing a black lacey bra, high heels, and nothing else.
Analysts insist on seeing their patients four and sometimes five days a week because each session opens up the doors of the unconscious, and in order to allow upsetting emotions to emerge on any given day, a patient needs the reassurance of knowing there will be another session the following day. I was plainly running to China because I needed to follow up on some anxiety that’d been evoked in our last session, i.e., my increasing attraction to her, which I’d subverted with some superficial nonsense about missing the conference. Seeing China for the first time without her clothes on, I was faced with a totally new problem. Hopefully this encounter with her naked body was something that I could deal with the next day in analysis. Barring that, she might be willing to work through things right then and there.
Staring at China, my vision momentarily clouded over. I could see her face, but after the initial shock of seeing her nakedness, I could only see a dark blur when my eyes traveled down to her glorious bush. All of a sudden I found myself in her arms. I was not able to recollect the activity that ensued, but I was sure it would come back to me later as déjà vu, especially if we had finally ended up having sex. At the very least, I imagined that it was better than any foreplay that Johnny Holmes, the legendary Buttman, or any of the great porn stars had ever enacted.
The downside was that it had occurred without a concomitant facility to appreciate it, or even to know it was happening. It reminded me of the old philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I had my wits about me enough to know that whatever was happening would be a subject of discussion in our next analytic session. What goes on between analyst and patient is the substance of analysis itself; it is the content of the transference, significant in that it shows the patient the behaviors and emotions he demonstrates in all situations of his life. I was having fantasies about my analyst similar to the ones I had with all the women in my life — except of course my mother. I imagined fucking them, which wasn’t surprising since the women I was attracted to were inevitably prostitutes, whose role in life is to entice men into paying them for sex.
The hotel room was now cast in shadows. We lay in each other’s arms and then switched into the spoon position, which is how we slept for the next forty-five minutes, a span of time that exceeded any of our sessions. Yes, I was in room 1269, but the space was totally transformed — not only was it dark, but there was no television on. When I awakened, I was sure that this was going to be it. My penis was swollen and looked like one of those booster rockets that sends the space shuttle into the stratosphere, but my expectations for consummation and release were disappointed when China jumped out of bed and cried out, “I’m missing Germany and Spain!” I’d fallen into a deep sleep and was disorientated for a moment. Could our passionate prelude have created sudden longings of the Teutonic and Castilian varieties? I wondered why she had chosen the European Union when she was of Japanese and Chinese descent. But then I realized that as an avid soccer fan, she was talking about the championship match that was occurring that day. She flipped on the lights so she could find the remote, and for the first time I was able to see my analyst from head to toe in all her nakedness. Like the aristocratic Tiffany I met at The Catwalk, she too had a dramatic Venus mound and large dark nipples of the kind I have found prevalent among women of Asian extraction.