Barbara's failure to initiate a sexual relationship with me sprang not from her inexperience in such matters but from a familiarity with them considerably more sophisticated than my own. She was taking her time and knew what she was doing. In 1939 there were a lot more virgins in our Long Island set than there would be today, nor was there any stigma to it. Indeed, rather the reverse. If a girl was "fast," she didn't brag about it. Which is why I didn't know that Barbara had had an affair with a married groom attached to the stables of our country club. But some mothers knew about it, and it had not made her more marriageable in the area. Barbara was twenty-three, a bit older than I, and her father's financial reverses in the Depression had made penniless matches, however romantic, less tempting. Oh, I don't mean that she was really mercenary, but her friends were all married or getting married, and she wanted to get away from her family and be on her own, and she liked me and liked to be with me, so why not? I was what is called a catch. And she knew she would be a good and loyal wife, which is indeed just what she has beenâto Frank Cooper.
She had the acumen to understand that sexual timidity in a virginal young man was not necessarily fatal to his becoming an adequate, even forceful, lover. She also had the rarer sense, usually possessed only by older women, to know that gentleness was the way to handle such cases. We began to kiss on meeting and parting, at first cheek-to-cheek, then on the lips. Soon we were hugging and even necking. There was a children's playhouse on her family's estate, long disused, as she and her brothers were grown, and we sometimes met there. She at last dared to consent to lie naked in my arms on the couch if I agreed to remain dressed and would only stroke her. Startled but excited, I agreed.
I grasped her tightly as soon as she was bare, almost as if I were trying to cover her up to spare her the shame of her nudity, but when my hands glided over her soft back and buttocks, I felt a surge of ecstasy with a stiff erection. I started to pull down my pants, and then it happened. Far from urging me to desist, she cried, "Hurry! Hurry!" with a shrillness in her tone I had never heard before.
Of course, it was the urgency of her cry that revealed the full force of her expectation. She wanted it! How she wanted it! And wasn't it her right? But being her right made it, alas, my obligation. All my old doubts about my masculinity, plus the hideous fear that I was presuming to play a role I was not fit to play, rose up to throttle me. My erection was lost, shriveled beyond hope of revival, and I could only abjectly apologize.
Thinking back now, I can wonder what would have happened if Barbara had been able to laugh and pooh-pooh the whole thing, if she had got up with an air of insouciance and said, "Better luck next time." She certainly had the intelligence to know that that might have been the way to handle me, and she tried to act accordingly later. But then it was too late. At the time, the poor girl was so aflame with readiness that the frustration was actually physically painful, and she could not help bursting into tears. I was shattered.
Despite all her efforts, we were never the same again, and when she started seeing Frank Cooper, a handsome hulk of a man who had nothing like my money but who held down a big job at a big bank, I did not feel I had the right to interfere.
As I have pointed out, this was certainly a grave crisis in my patient's life. Had Barbara been able to make light of it immediately afterward, who knows what might have happened? The next time they might have tried it with him stripped and her clothed. It could have worked. The question Marvin was to put to me sarcastically when he became my patientâcould I have turned him into the commuting husband with the wife in the station wagonâmight conceivably have been answered in the affirmative. As a psychiatrist
She had the acumen to understand that sexual timidity in a virginal young man was not necessarily fatal to his becoming an adequate, even forceful, lover. She also had the rarer sense, usually possessed only by older women, to know that gentleness was the way to handle such cases. We began to kiss on meeting and parting, at first cheek-to-cheek, then on the lips. Soon we were hugging and even necking. There was a children's playhouse on her family's estate, long disused, as she and her brothers were grown, and we sometimes met there. She at last dared to consent to lie naked in my arms on the couch if I agreed to remain dressed and would only stroke her. Startled but excited, I agreed.
I grasped her tightly as soon as she was bare, almost as if I were trying to cover her up to spare her the shame of her nudity, but when my hands glided over her soft back and buttocks, I felt a surge of ecstasy with a stiff erection. I started to pull down my pants, and then it happened. Far from urging me to desist, she cried, "Hurry! Hurry!" with a shrillness in her tone I had never heard before.
Of course, it was the urgency of her cry that revealed the full force of her expectation. She wanted it! How she wanted it! And wasn't it her right? But being her right made it, alas, my obligation. All my old doubts about my masculinity, plus the hideous fear that I was presuming to play a role I was not fit to play, rose up to throttle me. My erection was lost, shriveled beyond hope of revival, and I could only abjectly apologize.
Thinking back now, I can wonder what would have happened if Barbara had been able to laugh and pooh-pooh the whole thing, if she had got up with an air of insouciance and said, "Better luck next time." She certainly had the intelligence to know that that might have been the way to handle me, and she tried to act accordingly later. But then it was too late. At the time, the poor girl was so aflame with readiness that the frustration was actually physically painful, and she could not help bursting into tears. I was shattered.
Despite all her efforts, we were never the same again, and when she started seeing Frank Cooper, a handsome hulk of a man who had nothing like my money but who held down a big job at a big bank, I did not feel I had the right to interfere.
As I have pointed out, this was certainly a grave crisis in my patient's life. Had Barbara been able to make light of it immediately afterward, who knows what might have happened? The next time they might have tried it with him stripped and her clothed. It could have worked. The question Marvin was to put to me sarcastically when he became my patientâcould I have turned him into the commuting husband with the wife in the station wagonâmight conceivably have been answered in the affirmative. As a psychiatrist
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