Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

China was wearing high sandals that laced up around her calves and a tight-fitting leotard top that accentuated her pert breasts, whose nipples were already hardened by the time we stood facing each other in the elevator. Besides her Japanese background, China plainly had some Chinese blood in her too. In fact, she looked a little like Chiang Kai-shek. I wondered if she was of aristocratic lineage. Perhaps she was Chiang’s great granddaughter. Maybe her great grandparents had even witnessed the Long March, in which Mao and his Communist forces retreated from the Kuomintang. Perhaps they’d even known Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic. I suddenly had an urge to ask her about the status of Taiwan and the two small islands of Kimoy and Matsu. To mitigate my nervousness, I attempted some banal small talk. “I’ve never actually walked into an appointment accompanied by my analyst,” I said. “Usually my analyst is already there.”

“Yes, usually the analyst is seeing other patients before and after your appointment,” China replied somewhat blandly. “It’s different now because I am not waiting for you, and you probably don’t anticipate taking leave of me in the normal manner after your session has ended. This breakdown in the normal order of things is causing an upsurge of fantasies that you may not be entirely ready to handle. There may be fantasies of triumph, and countervailing fantasies of retribution for the success you are afraid you don’t deserve.”

The elevator swooped up to the twelfth floor and I followed China out. I started to shake as we walked down the long corridor. I began to worry that I was going to pee in my pants, even though I still wasn’t wearing any. China swiped her key card and ushered me into her suite. When I saw how neat and clean everything was, I decided that the air of order and calm must have been an indication of her Taoist origins.

Her room had a beautiful view of the ocean. I immediately started to compare it to mine, which only had the so-called “garden view,” meaning that it looked out on the enormous condensers that cooled my wing of the hotel. I was feeling short-changed, which, of course, was only more grist for the analytic mill. Some women experience classical penis envy, but I had always suffered from vagina envy. I wanted to be a beautiful woman who was taken care of by rich men, and who effortlessly commanded the kind of view that I was looking at now. I was tired of being a guy who had to scrape his way through life, depending on the kindness of concierges. Our rooms epitomized the two different worlds that we operated in. My room had practically no natural light, while hers was filled with a blinding sunlight that I imagined illuminated every fold of the organ that rhymed with her name. I was fortunate to have an analyst whose name evoked the very organ I so envied. I knew that sex-change operations were possible, but in the end I am not an adventurous spirit. If I got a vagina, I would be limited to having lesbian relationships with Tiffanys. I wasn’t sure how I was going to resolve these feelings. I both wanted to be a woman and to fuck them.

China pulled the chair out from her writing desk, which was equipped with a phone and fax machine. She nonchalantly flipped her television to CNN and proceeded to slide into her armchair, affording her a good view of the impressive plasma screen behind my head. The arrangement felt a little odd, but I wanted to let my first one-minute session take its course.

“Well, we’ll continue next time,” she said without any prompting from me. I got up and immediately sat down again. I knew that China was a Lacanian, but it was as if she were reading my mind. How had she figured out my preferred therapeutic parameters? Each of our initial sessions lasted exactly one minute, and after 16 of them, back-to-back, she went over to her computer and printed out an invoice.

I’d had therapists who made valiant but not always successful attempts to keep their eyes open during sessions. But this was the first time I had an analyst who insisted on watching television while I went on about my problems. What was particularly unfair about it was that, with the television behind me, I couldn’t see anything except China’s face. This was an unusual configuration for analysis, in which patients and their doctors don’t ordinarily make eye contact. In the past, when I’d been in a session with a sleepy therapist, I’d grit my teeth and force myself to talk about the discomfort I was feeling. (In one unfortunate instance, I fell asleep on the couch myself, only to wake up to find that we were both sleeping through the session, my analyst snoring softly behind me.) But I was having trepidation about opening up to China, considering the secret longings I harbored for her.

During most of our early sessions, China watched CNN International, but there were times when I could see she was bored or irritated by the news, especially reports about the refusal of the Chinese to revalue their currency. At these moments, she picked up the remote and switched to a sports network that carried soccer games. She loved the Brazilian team, but she also turned out to be a major David Beckham fan, and felt the best thing that ever happened to the American economy was recruiting Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy. On several occasions, I tried to talk about my personal history and early upbringing, but it was hard to get a word in edgewise, between China’s vexation about currency fluctuations and her lusty enthusiasm for futebol .

“You know what they did to the Iraqi soccer team when they lost under Saddam Hussein? They tortured them.” I wasn’t sure if China was recommending torture over steroids, but I began to suspect that there might be a method to her madness, and that all her television watching was some new Lacanian technique aimed at causing my long-repressed emotions to spew forth. I got the distinct feeling that she discounted the importance of my early years and my long-winded recollections of playing with those pink Spalding rubber balls in Kew Gardens. I wasn’t sure which parts of my past were of analytic significance, and with only a minute per session, it was often difficult to discriminate.

Only 32 minutes had passed, but I had already paid my bill for two months worth of sessions and I could feel a sea change in my personality. China had excused herself to go to the bathroom, and through the door I could hear her tinkling. In all my years of therapy, I had never seen or heard a shrink go to the bathroom, and there were times when I had the distinct feeling that, like parthenogenesis, in which fertilization occurs without the necessity of insemination, there were therapists who never went to the bathroom at all. China was plainly someone who pissed and shat as we all do. She was a real person.

At first I thought it was my imagination, but I started to notice that there were moments when China was actually paying more attention to me than to the television, and I wondered if her kindly gaze was showing far more than mere compassion for the sufferings of her patient. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, but I realized that this was a situation in which all my years of paying for sex would come in handy — if only I could endure 16 more minutes before asking her if I could purchase some kind of sexual service along with the psychoanalysis. (It would be rude to interrupt in the middle of a billing cycle.)

There are many men and women for whom sex isn’t a financial transaction. After all, not all women are whores, even in a place like Rio. But a situation in which I was already paying for a woman’s services as a therapist segued naturally, in my mind at least, into offering her compensation to slake my carnal desires.

Despite the question of whether our analysis would evolve into prostitution, and the puzzle as to why China insisted on keeping the television on during our sessions, this early period of the analysis, especially the first 192 sessions (the equivalent of a year’s worth in a little over three hours), were some of the most fulfilling of all the work we would do together. In fact, we were so engrossed in the analysis that we both forgot about the erotomania lecture we were supposed to attend. About halfway through that first “year,” I discovered that China was not wearing underpants, and from what I could see, China’s vagina was a hairy one. The effect of her all-natural bush was rather dramatic in exciting the drives that were the essence of my manhood. It took me a while to get up the courage to talk to China about the fact that I could see her vagina and that it was having an effect on the analysis, but when I did she was remarkably calm in response, saying only, “I was wondering how long you were going to continue denying what was right in front of your eyes.”