“Uh-oh,” Carlos said.
“What?” I asked.
Carlos and Rory exchanged a knowing glance. Then Carlos broke the news to me. “Don’t you know that once you start psychotherapy all your sex dreams are about your therapist?”
Dr. Rosen nodded. “Van-de-Ross, sounds like ‘Rosen.’ ”
“My god, they practically rhyme.” I rolled my eyes. In no universe did my slim, balding, Jewish therapist resemble my new main man Luther. Dr. Rosen threw up his hands and shrugged. He wasn’t going to try to convince me, which was the quickest way to get me to second-guess myself.
“Why do you have to make everything about you?” I murmured “creep” loud enough for him to hear. Then I ignored him as he rubbed his chest as if I’d said he was a stellar therapist. I refused to look at him, and the group moved on to another topic.
“Do you understand why that dream was possible?” Dr. Rosen turned to me with two minutes to go in the session. I shook my head. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that you were able to express your rage directly to me two weeks ago, and then you had an orgasmic dream about me?”
I ignored the part where he connected my rage and sexual desire and bit on his insistence that the dream was about him.
“Why are you trying to ruin my dream?”
“Why would having sex with me ruin it?”
“You’re my shrink.” My face contorted at the thought.
“And?”
“What happened to Dr. Celebrate Everything?”
“I am celebrating. I’m not the one resisting.”
“Resistant” was the one charge I couldn’t ignore. It was the gravest therapeutic transgression, and I cringed when I saw it in my group mates. Dr. Rosen had been urging Rory to apply for jobs at higher-paying civil-rights organizations that would give her primo benefits, but she insisted that she could get hired only at legal clinics in Wisconsin that were run on a shoestring. With her credentials she could have worked anywhere in the Chicago area, but she continued to commute to Waupun, Wisconsin, and got pissed whenever we prodded her to reach for Something Better. Resistance—to change, to pleasure, to a shorter commute—was what held us back from what we really wanted. I would not commit that sin, even if I would rather punch Dr. Rosen in his smug little face than acknowledge my dream was about his saggy ass.
“Fine.” I scooted to the edge of my seat and sat up straight. I gripped the arms of my chair and whispered in a singsong voice, “Dr. Rosen, I’d love to have your face in my crotch. I’m dying for you to put your tongue on me and slowly, slowly, slowly circle me until I come.” I moaned a little for effect.
“Damn, girl,” Carlos murmured.
The Colonel’s eyes opened, cartoon-character wide. Rory blushed and cast her gaze to the window.
Dr. Rosen blinked twice. Then he said, “You’re ready for another group.”
Everyone waited for me to speak but I had no words, only sensations: hot Luther between my legs, annoyance at Dr. Rosen roiling in my belly, and the terror rising through my chest as I digested his words.
I mumbled the prayer at the end of group and walked out with Carlos in a haze. He put his arm around my shoulders. “I told you you’d get your chance for a second group.”
Of course, now that I had it, I questioned it. Did I really want a whole other group? Coming downtown twice a week to excavate pinworm memories and pick up prescriptions to call group mates about my basic human functions? Why had I wanted this so badly? I thought it would make me feel like a favored child, like one of Rosen’s Chosen, but now the invitation to a second group made me feel ashamed of how sick I must be.
The following week, I opened the session with my burning question: “Why now?” Dr. Rosen hadn’t even taken his seat—he was futzing with the blinds across the room.
He took his seat and considered my question. “Your willingness to bring the dream into group, to be proud of it, and to discuss it means you’re ready.”
“For what?”
“For more.”
“More what?”
“Heat. Intimacy. Intensity. Sex.”
“Will it help me with relationships?”
“Guaranteed.”
“Now group is like Best Buy?”
Sometimes I felt like Rosen-world was a cult. I’d begun to spot Rosen-patients out in the wild. In a 12-step meeting, I heard a woman say, “My name is Ginny, and my crazy therapist told me to tell you all that I’m bingeing on off-brand Oreos.” Before she said another word, I realized I’d heard about her from Carlos: she was dating Chip from the men’s group, and they almost broke up because he wouldn’t go down on her. In another meeting, a woman sat in the middle of the circle taking superhuman bites of a Burger King Whopper. In the eleven years I’d been in recovery meetings for eating disorders, I’d never seen anyone eat so much as an oyster cracker during a meeting. Most meetings had an explicit rule that you weren’t supposed to mention any specific foods by name because you could trigger someone’s bingeing. So seeing someone devour a Whopper was shocking—like seeing the moon fall from the sky and land in your lap. Marnie leaned over and whispered: “She’s got to be one of us.” We later confirmed that Dr. Rosen had given her a prescription to gorge on fast food during meetings instead of in secret at home.
How would increasing my participation in Rosen-world mesh with my daily life as a seminormal person? As a law student, it was tricky to reconcile my public, professional trajectory with my, shall we say, unorthodox therapy life. Keeping Baby Jeremiah in my closet. Calling Rory and Marty every night. Telling the Smoker I’m a “cocktease.” Part of me wanted to join the second group for the same reason I joined the first: I was curious. Curious about who would be in my group and how my life
