If I Should Die Before I Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d picked out himself. Actually he’d watched her on television, and he’d come of his own volition.
    â€œHe has a sex problem,” the Counselor’s Wife said. “He announced that right off the bat, the first session. Almost before he sat down. He said he could do sex in the sense of getting an erection, doing intercourse, but it didn’t go anywhere for him. That was what he called it: doing sex, doing intercourse. He said he didn’t get aroused, didn’t feel anything particularly. Nothing happened. He didn’t come. Finally the erection would just go away, either because he got tired or else bored.
    â€œYou should know that it’s not uncommon at all, although I’ve never met a male patient who didn’t think it was unique to him. There’s a whole body of case literature on the subject. But that’s not the point. He wanted to deal with it, for me to deal with it, like … like it was an abstraction. I mean, I was a sex therapist, wasn’t I? Well, if all he wanted was to have pleasure in sex like anybody else, he didn’t see why I was interested in what he’d dreamt as a child. The usual stuff.
    â€œAnyway, it turned out not to be so simple. It never is, otherwise …”
    She got the recorder going then.
    To listen to all she’d taped would have taken a lot longer than the time we had, but even the playbacks she’d selected had a kind of mind-numbing effect. Maybe shrinks are used to it, maybe they can listen to a disembodied voice and fill in the blanks, but I didn’t know what he looked like, couldn’t see the body language that went with his flat, nasal, preppy-sounding accent, and I couldn’t help focusing on his verbal tics, like the way he had of tacking “you know?” on to the back of his sentences, turning every other sentence into a question. There were the pauses too, long ones sometimes, when you imagined him sitting in the chair I was sitting in or just lying on the couch and the Counselor’s Wife waiting, just waiting, and even though I knew that part of being a shrink is getting the patient to bounce words off the blank wall of the shrink, I didn’t see how she could stand it.
    To hear him tell it, he and his peers spent most of their nights hanging out in a bunch of East Side bars, waiting for the “bridge-and-tunnel bunnies” to show up. They called it “trolling.” The saloons were the kind that cater to the under-age crowd. The bunnies were girls from Brooklyn, Queens, the Island, out for high times and kicks and sometimes getting more than they’d bargained for. The Counselor’s Wife may have called it group sex; to me it sounded like gang bangs, sometimes uglier than that, and the wonder of it was that this Carter McCloy—for that turned out to be his name—hadn’t long since had the shit kicked out of him by vengeful bridge-and-tunnel fathers and brothers.
    He hadn’t. He claimed that he didn’t take part in the rough stuff. Maybe so. But he also told about one of the schools he’d been expelled from years before. A faculty daughter had claimed that Carter McCloy had beaten her up. According to Carter McCloy, the faculty daughter had made him do it. The scandal had been hushed up; McCloy had been sent home.
    If he hadn’t taken part, then he’d certainly watched. He described it in detail, and it took me a while to realize that the detail was for the Counselor’s Wife’s benefit. Because, to hear him tell it, he didn’t feel a thing.
    â€œWhy don’t you ever say anything?” he said at one point, and you could hear the irritation in his otherwise flat voice. “I mean, you’re always asking me stuff like: ‘How did you feel about that? Did that give you pleasure?’” Pause. “The great Dr. Saroff. Why don’t you tell me what she feels?”
    Pause.
    â€œI wasn’t there,”