Private Practices (17 page)

Emily thought about cultural stereotypes and how hard they were to change. She would have to mention this to Dr. Zauber the next time she saw him. Already, although it was another full month before she would see him again, she was storing up material for their conversations. He was always so shy, and yet so interesting to talk with, so thoughtful. She smoothed out the folds of the dress she was wearing, wondering if he would like it and whether Philip would, and finally took it off and asked the salesclerk to write up the bill for it.

“Sometimes I think the manufacturers think pregnancy has nothing to do with sex,” the salesclerk murmured as she wrote.

Emily began to laugh, thinking of her nightly adventures with Philip. “If they only knew,” she said to the clerk.

The young woman seemed to understand what she was talking about. She winked one jade-green eye and her shoulders began to shake. “If they only knew,” she sputtered, her long red curls dancing. And then the two of them were giggling helplessly, noisy, convivial conspirators.

Emily was still smiling to herself when, on the way to the elevator, with her new dress wrapped and boxed, she saw a woman she thought she recognized standing at the negligee counter. The woman was tall and pale, with shiny blond hair, and Emily remembered having seen her at the Zaubers' office several times. Her large leather handbag was placed carelessly open on the counter, and she was holding a white silk negligee up to the light.

She must be rich, Emily thought. She must be rolling in money. Anyone who bothered with pregnancy night-clothes had to be rolling in money. She herself had had to make do by borrowing a few gowns and a robe from her mother, who wore a size sixteen. Emily passed Claudia and eyed her jealously.

Claudia waited up for Sidney, resting on the chaise longue in the bedroom, wearing the new silk negligee she had bought, and wondering what kind of mood her husband would be in when he returned from the hospital. A bad one, she surmised, at least if the phone call she'd had from Cora right after she'd gotten home from work could be taken as any indication of what she might expect.

Cora had been indignant. She'd said Sidney had threatened to fire her. All because she'd spoken up for some woman who'd wanted his signature on her medical insurance form. Sidney's moods were getting her all mixed up, Cora had complained. They'd always been bad, ever since she'd first come to work for the Zaubers eight years before, but in the past month they were really getting impossible. She couldn't talk to him, couldn't reason with him. She had asked Claudia to use her influence with Sidney to make him relent, both about herself and about the woman's form.

Claudia hadn't been very encouraging. Once Sidney made up his mind about something, his opinion could only be altered by a change that came from deep within him, never by the reasoning of others. No one really had influence over Sidney, Claudia thought.

It was one of the things that she had once found so fascinating about him. She had been his patient before she had been his wife, referred to him by Mulenberg's office. Sidney had spent a half hour with her before he examined her and asked her a host of questions about herself. She had been surprised. Mulenberg had never probed into her personal history. But Sidney had seemed intensely interested in minutiae and that, too, had seemed fascinating to her. Of course, answering his questions had been difficult for a woman as reserved as herself, but because he was a doctor, and because he seemed to need, not merely want, her answers, she had spoken up as forthrightly as she could.

He had asked her about her age at the time of first intercourse, and whether she had ever been pregnant, and whether she had pain during intercourse when she didn't have the infection, and posed dozens of questions about the birth control pills she had newly persuaded Mulenberg to let her take. She had told him everything he wanted to know and even told him about her father, a lawyer and a poet and a drunk, who had died in an auto crash when she was fifteen, and about her mother, who had left him once, the winter Claudia was thirteen, returning too late to have prevented Ezra Harding's series of Scotch-gaudy nights in bed with his tremulous daughter.

Claudia had spoken of it only once before, not to her mother and never while her father lived. She had told the story to Harry Mulenberg after she had been his patient for three years. She had gone to Mulenberg during her first Thanksgiving vacation from Radcliffe at the urging of a boyfriend who wanted her to get a diaphragm. She had never used the diaphragm but had broken up with the boyfriend instead. In those days sex had seemed ugly, a bother, only a means to an end to her. She had stopped seeing the young man who had given her Mulenberg's name, and many another young man too, always after only a month or two of intimacy. But she went on seeing Mulenberg for Pap smears and breast examinations. And one day, about to graduate from college and jealous of the many friends she had who had formed more lasting relationships than she had been able to, she had blurted out her experience with her father to Mulenberg.

He had seemed the perfect person to whom to unburden herself. Kindly and casual, even flippant about sex, he made her feel that somehow he could lessen her fears of sexuality, put them into perspective.

She needed perspective. For years after the brief incestuous encounter with her father, she had been sure that in some way, although she had been the victim of lust, she had also been the instigator. She remembered well that at thirteen she had been involved in a fierce adolescent battle with her mother, and had used flirtation with her father, the more powerful parent, to win occasional victories over maternal rules and regulations. But when her father, drunk, had taken her to bed, she had felt degraded, rather than victorious. And despicable. As if she herself had planned the seduction. It was only after Harry Mulenberg, growing angry and red in the face as she told her tale, said, “Jesus Christ! You call that a father! What a son of a bitch,” that she felt the first stirrings of absolution from her guilt.

Afterward, her love life began to improve. By the time she first met Sidney, five years after her confession to Mulenberg, she had put the experience with her father behind her, had a half-dozen full-blown, long-lived romances and affairs, and learned to feel better about her body. But she never told any of the young men she slept with about the incest. When she told Sidney, she did so because he seemed to her merely an extension of Mulenberg, a professional persona and not an individual personality.

Sidney's response to her story had been cool, clinically nonjudgmental. After examining her, he had given her a prescription for antibiotics and she had gone home and thought no more about him.

Four months later, he had called her at work and invited her to the theater. She had been distressed, recalling at once all she had revealed about herself, and had almost refused him. But it was Christmas week. And she had just broken up with the young Columbia law student she had been seeing for six months. And she was terribly lonely. She went out with Sidney and he didn't refer to what she had said in the office but talked to her about the theater, medicine and her new job at the photography museum. When, several dates later, she herself brought up the uneasy matter of her revelations, he had said, “I never let my professional knowledge of someone affect my personal knowledge of them. You and I are starting out from scratch. You can tell me anything you want, or you can keep quiet about yourself altogether. As far as I'm concerned, I've forgotten everything you told me in the office.”

At the time, his words had seemed generous to her. She had confessed what troubled her most, and Sidney had not only accepted it and her along with it, but had been willing to go past the past, to wipe it all out of his memory. It made her feel free. She was twenty-five and he was almost forty.

Months later, by the time he asked her to marry him, she knew that it was an impossibility to shut out of the memory anything one has learned, and that Sidney had sensed something about her during their first encounter which had made him keen to draw her to him. Knowing this had made her feel less free. Indeed, there were times with Sidney when she felt trapped, imprisoned. But Sidney was already an eminent doctor and researcher, and she had always been drawn to power. Sidney intrigued her. He had a blustery egotism and self-assurance that made him totally unlike the people she had grown up with. He was brilliant, and knew it, and successful, and knew it, and as a result he was totally uncompromising. He rarely ingratiated himself with anyone, whereas being submissive and pleasing had been so ingrained in Claudia that she thought it a breach of manners to have a strong opinion.

Sidney's manners were terrible. He was rude, self-centered, even explosive whenever he cared to be. His respect for other men in his field was nonexistent. She found herself admiring his disregard for everything she had been raised to consider socially essential. While she herself continued to be impeccably polite, she secretly reveled in Sidney's rudeness.

When he proposed to her, her best friend and roommate Bootie Talcott warned her that men like Sidney were wonderful to visit, but disaster to live with. But Claudia ignored Bootie's advice and accepted Sidney.

He'd rarely made love to her before they were married, but the few times he did she remembered vividly. He had never been tender, but he had been intense, and she had had with him the first orgasms she had ever had during intercourse. But his work was so demanding, so time-consuming, that often, even during their courtship, he claimed to be too tired for sex. Courtship was exhausting for everyone, he always said, but especially for doctors who, more than other men, needed the tranquility of a permanent liaison, the stability of marriage.

Lying yearningly in his arms, Claudia had decided he was right. And then on their honeymoon, she had had to beg him to make love to her. And only when she had begged and wheedled for several days, did he agree. She had found it insulting but it had excited him.

In the remaining days of their honeymoon—they had gone to Geneva where Sidney delivered a paper on birth control at an international conference—he continued to make sex a reward she had to strive to obtain. He insisted on sexual games that unnerved and dismayed her. He would make love to her only if she would first tell him her sexual fantasies, or read to him from pornographic novels, or masturbate him lengthily while he lay on the bed reading medical journals with which he had overstuffed their suitcases, or let him fondle her clitoris while she sat spread-legged on the toilet.

She found most of his requests humiliating, not in and of themselves but because she had hoped that once they were finally living together and there were no longer the strains of late-night meetings, he would be excited by her body alone. Throughout her high school and college years her cool, distant, long-limbed beauty had provoked instant passion in a myriad of men and boys. But Sidney wanted her to work at arousing him. Or needed her to work at it.

She assumed it had something to do with his practice and an overexposure to women's bodies and genitals. But although she was bitterly disappointed, she did his bidding, the very fact of his resistance making her keen to accommodate him. By holding himself back from her sexually, whether willfully or undesignedly, he made himself a prize which she had perpetually to win again through feats of compliance.

At home, in the Fifth Avenue co-op her mother gave them as a wedding gift, these feats were mostly in the bedroom. He liked her to beg him to make love to her, to stand before him naked and masturbating and pleading with him to enter her, or to beat her across the buttocks or the thighs and have her playact the part of a bad little girl, begging him for forgiveness for some invented wrong. But even in the rest of their apartment, she found herself humbling herself to him. In the kitchen he was fault-finding, demanding perfection in the offerings she made for their guests. And unless she made herself obsequious and deferred to his attitudes and opinions in the living room, he would refuse to have sex with her altogether.

Nothing disturbed her as much as that refusal because it was only after sex that Sidney would let her have access to what she wanted far more than his body. It was only after she had served and pleased and stimulated him sufficiently for him to let down his guard with her and ejaculate and relax that he would open up to her at all, letting her be privy—sometimes—to his thoughts, his dreams, his soul. She craved these. She considered him the most brilliant man she had ever known, and certainly the most renowned.

Sidney's career had flourished during their marriage. He was made a full professor at the medical school, was courted by innumerable research foundations and was rumored to be next in line for a top advisory position with the World Health Organization. The more successful Sidney became, the more she took pride in being married to him, trying to forget that when they were alone, he allowed her little pride.

Sitting on the chaise, she finally heard him at the door and felt the surge of excitement she always experienced when he returned home at night. But she didn't get up to greet him. She knew how methodical he was, how he needed, when he first arrived, to pour himself a drink, to look through his mail, and to wash away the hospital, scrubbing and running the hall bathroom sink endlessly. She sat with her toes curled under the cool silk and waited.

At last he came into the bedroom and, seeing her, gave her a slight half-bow. “That's nice,” he said, nodding approvingly at her nightgown. “You look glamorous. Almost like your old self.” He lay down on the bed opposite her, his shoes on the coverlet, his arms behind his head, asking, “What did you do today?”

“Nothing much. I went shopping. And then to my job.”

“You didn't have lunch with anyone?”

He sounded so suspicious that she looked over at him sharply. “No. Why?”

“Just wondered.” He kicked off his shoes, removing them with his feet alone.