he was sorry for any sorrow he may have caused her. He told her that, yes, he did like young women, found them beautiful, and that he knew he'd been wrong to touch them the way he had, and that he was grateful to her for having warned him off this admittedly unattractive practice. ‘I owe you a great deal for that,’ G said, ‘and yet there's something else I'd ask you to do for me.’ When she asked him what that was, he told her he would appreciate it very much if she would slap him hard once again.
She was astonished by his request, excited by it, too. “You really want that?” she asked. He said he did, that he needed it as a reminder to behave himself. Though she would be gone, he told her, he would still be instructing young girls, thus he wanted to carry the sting of her slap as a memory. She let him plead a while, then agreed.
“Again,” she said, “I pulled back my arm and hit him as hard as I could. I was bigger then, stronger, able to hit much harder. In fact, I hit him so hard that this time he reeled back.”
Again she felt the same slick warmth below, but much more powerfully than when she was fourteen. She was eighteen years old then, knew she was a beauty, had confidence, poise, was a fully sexual being. And this time G reacted differently. He fell to his knees before her, lowered his head, and slavishly kissed the uppers of her tall, black riding boots. Studying him as he did, she felt a great surge of power. She reached down, placed her fingers in G's hair, pulled his head toward her crotch. At this, he gently pulled down her jodhpurs, buried his head in her groin, and performed cunnilingus upon her. “I came within seconds,” she said. It was the first time she'd ever had oral sex with a man. After her orgasm, she pushed him away, buttoned up her riding pants, and told him she had to go. Her last image of G was of him still on his knees, bent over, head turned toward the tack room floor. She never saw him again.^2
During the winter term of her first year in college, she received news of her father's death. He was training a horse while drunk, fell off, and suffered a mortal head injury. She was greatly upset by this news and went into what she termed “a deep depression.”
Coming out of it that spring, she began a succession of brief sexual affairs with boys. Most were one- or two-night stands, others continued for several weeks. She wanted to learn about men and male sexuality and felt the best way to do this was to have sex with as many boys as possible.
She said she found these sexual explorations enormously liberating, as she was now for the first time away from home and out of her mother's control. And she made an effort, she said, when breaking up with her lovers, not to replicate the cruel, dismissive manner of her mother. Rather, she said, she took pains “to show compassion, letting them down easy so as not to bruise their tender egos.”
She soon developed a fondness for experienced, affectionate men, culminating in an affair with a graduate teaching assistant, H, who was ten years older, and which lasted through the winter and spring terms of
2. Various bits of this narrative, not recounted here, strongly suggest the possibility that G and Mrs. F's mother had an affair in the past and that Mrs. F somehow understood this. her sophomore year.
When it came time to break off with H, his reaction was unexpected. Rather than accepting her decision, as others had, H took to stalking her, following her about campus, phoning her then hanging up when she answered, finding her in the college library when she was studying, sitting across the table from her then staring at her until she looked up, etc. Frightened, she confronted him. H told her he adored her and couldn't live without her, that he didn't want to stalk her but felt compelled to do so since the compulsion was beyond his control. Though unmoved by his professions of adoration, she felt thrilled for having inspired them. Describing the sensation, she said: “I felt enormously powerful and I believe the feeling was erotic.”
She knew she was seductive and felt moved to test her seductive powers again and again. “I make men fall in love with me, bring them to their knees so to speak, then I would reaffirm my power as a woman. But once I conquered them, I quickly lost interest. For me the seductions were far more interesting than the relationships. Actually I found hanging out with these lovesick guys quite tiresome after a while.”
Concerned that her sexual behavior was becoming obsessive, she sought out therapy at the student health services division of her college. Here, asked whether she had a gender preference in regard to the therapist, she specifically requested a male. Dr. L, the man to whom she was assigned, was a clinical psychologist in his forties, married with three children. Asked how she knew this, she replied that he displayed an array of family photographs on his office desk.
Immediately, she said, she set out to seduce him. All she had to do, she said, was recount her sexual adventures, including detailed descriptions of her lovemaking and the explosive power of her orgasms. “I had him panting for me before the end of our first hour,” she said.
After two weeks, Dr L yielded to her completely. “He was an easy score,” she said. She described pulling off her panties, balling them up and throwing them at him, the perching on his desk and pulling up her skirt. Immediately, she said he performed cunnilingus upon her. “I came so wildly,” she said, “thrashing about, I swept all his family photos to the floor.”
When asked if this gesture was deliberate, whether in retrospect she thought she was trying to displace Dr. L's loved ones, she answered in the affirmative. “I think I wanted to demolish his crummy little middle-class existence.”
Afterwards, Dr. L expressed great remorse, declaring he'd acted unprofessionally and would probably be fired, perhaps even blacklisted, if she ever told anyone what they'd done.
She remembered holding Dr. L in her arms, assuring him she would never tell and assuming all blame for their ‘indiscretion.’ At the end of the session, Dr. L told her he could not treat her any longer, that she had ‘acted out’ her problem on him and ‘I stupidly fell for the bait.’ He told her that in his opinion she needed intensive psychotherapy and recommended a female colleague. ‘But please,’ he begged her, ‘don't tell Dr. D what we did.’ When she asked how she could not tell Dr. D since what they had done was a symptom of the problem she needed to work through, Dr. L placed his head in his arms on his desk and sobbed.*3
Mrs. F decided not to pursue treatment with Dr. D. “For one thing, I'd lost confidence in the process. These psychologists, it seemed to me, were as weak or weaker than my fellow students. Also I had no desire to work with a woman. That would be too much like trying to get help from my mom.”
Instead, Mrs. F threw herself into sports and extracurricular activities, trying out for and winning a place on the women's varsity tennis squad. She also joined the college drama society and played secondary roles in several school plays.*4
*3 For further discussion of this incident and its relation to Mrs. F's psychoanalysis, see TRANSERENCE ISSUES ARISING IN THERAPY below
*4 In the course of one of these productions, she began an affair with another student, M, a drama major, who wanted to pursue a professional career in the theater. Some years later, after she was married, she used her position as a board member of the professional theater company in her city to secure M an appointment there as associate director. Then, when M moved to her city to take up his new position, she resumed her affair with him even though she was still married.
She met her future husband, A, her junior year at a horse-riding club dance when she was home for Christmas break. He was handsome, rich, smart, charming, and athletic, having all the qualities she felt a suitable husband should possess. He was clearly taken with her and she liked him too. “I don't know that I was actually in love with him, because, you see, I don't know if I'm really capable of love. But he was wonderful to be with. We had a lot of fun and the sex was great. So I decided ‘Hey! This one's probably worth holding onto.’”
They became engaged and were married three years later. Meantime, after graduation, she'd moved back to her hometown, taking up a job with a local arts organization. She rented her own apartment far from her mother's and spent several nights a week with her fiance.
During the period of her engagement, Mrs. F tried to work things out with her mother. They had a number of conversations in which each pledged to respect the choices of the other. They seemed to reach a modus Vivendi, and she was pleased that her mother seemed to like and approve of her fiance. For this reason, she was shocked when on her wedding day her mother accused her of being a whore. “It was as if she was trying to ruin the little happiness I'd managed to eke out.”
A year or so into the marriage, her pleasure in having sex with A began to diminish. By the second year, each had discreetly taken on a lover, accepted practice in their circle.^5
Together she and A had three children, two sons and a daughter. Then, eight years into her marriage, her three-year-old daughter, Belle, was snatched by her live-in au pair. The au pair turned up dead, and although the
