He and his girlfriend were having, he explained to his therapist, sex. She was bewitched by his tenuous hold on his obvious authority and he by the lengths she went to to affect an effortless beauty. “We’re not the first two people to do this,” he said, defensively, but when he focused his gaze he could see that the therapist wasn’t attacking. He shifted to an apologetic tone though he had not been accused. Why was he apologizing, then? Was he chicken? “It’s ‘sex,’” he said, fingers in the air around his ravaged face. “When you get old you have to put it in quotes because it contains other things and also does not quite contain itself anymore.” The therapist had been his girlfriend’s idea. The therapist was younger than her and attractive. The therapist was younger than her and frowned. The therapist was a thousand years old and made of dust. The therapist was a figment in the window that showed through its glass children playing in the snow. The therapist was a note he had scribbled to himself that said “burn the whole goddamned thing down.” The therapist was out of network and consequently he knew that this would be their final conversation, that it would solve nothing, that he would go right back to his apartment and fall into the same sad situation that had brought him here. He would not learn. He never learned. He was afraid he never learned. “That’s why I sent you there,” his girlfriend would say, and then disappear into the bathroom to get ready for the romp ahead. Sex!
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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