by Tom Wolfe
Magdalena said, “This is all going on in an office?”
“It’s mostly in the office,” said Dr. Lewis. “Home presents all sorts of problems… and obstacles. The wife, the children, the complete lack of solitude. I mean, if our boy Maurice were to create a little room where he could have complete privacy, just him and his computer, that would rouse all sorts of suspicions, and you could be sure his wife would find out everything. Believe me, she would.”
One of Dr. Lewis’s hands, still inside her dress, begins descending, sliding this way and that over her lower abdomen. And then two fingers slip under the upper elastic of her bikini panties, which were only barely there to begin with.
“And it’s taking up that much time?” said Magdalena. Her heart was racing. The words came out in an odd husky whisper.
Dr. Lewis seemed to have no such problem. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “Think about it for a moment. His cycle has now reached eighteen times a day, mostly in the office. He has no time left for anything else, and he can’t concentrate on anything else. He only has his intervals while he’s building up energy for more spasms. Other things—if he can’t take care of them in some kind of routine, rote manner, they don’t get done. He’s in another world, completely out of control, and that world is called Onanism.”
“Onanism.” Magdalena could only whisper it… in a husky manner. She was so aroused, she could barely speak.
All at once Dr. Lewis picked up her chair, with her in it, and turned it ninety degrees away from the desk—
“Norman! What are you doing!”
—and didn’t put it down until there was room enough for him to move in front of her and step between her legs. He said nothing and she said nothing. He looked down at her, smiling ever so slightly. She looked straight up at him. Dr. Lewis unbuttoned his white cotton I’m-a-doctor coat. His khaki pants bulged in the crotch, no more than six inches from her face. He began to unzip his pants slowly slowly slowly. He beamed a sly sly sly smile at Magdalena, like a grown-up about to give a little girl a present she had always wanted so-o-o-o bad. Slowly slowly slowly slyly the zipper—
A low-pitched burbling ring… It meant someone was pushing the bell at the entrance. You could hear the voices and laughter of men outside.
“Norman! That’s them! That’s 60 Minutes!”
“Now—while they’re at the door!” Dr. Lewis’s voice was suddenly more constricted and breathless than hers. “Do it now!”
“No, Norman! Are you crazy? I’ve got to let them in—and I’m already half naked! There’s no time!”
“This is the time—” croaked Dr. Lewis. “While they’re—at the—gate—”
He was having a hard time getting his breath. “Be an eternity before a moment like this—ever again! Just do it!”
Magdalena recoiled, thrusting the chair backward, and sprang to her feet. Her white nurse’s uniform was unbuttoned almost to the bottom. She felt completely naked.
Norman still had both hands on his zipper. He stared at her with a look that implied he was… hurt… baffled… betrayed.
“My God, Norman,” said Magdalena. “I think you really are crazy.”
The interview took place in Norman’s office. There were two cameras, one aimed at Norman, the other at the Grand Inquisitor, Ike Walsh. They sat across from each other in the side chairs that patients usually sat in. Already good and paranoid about the savage wiles of the Inquisitor, Magdalena suspected the idea was to keep Norman from sitting behind his big desk, with its aura of authority. She was very worried about what might be about to happen to Norman at the hands of the Inquisitor. After all, Ike Walsh was the pro. He had been through this sort of thing over and over. If he were to humiliate Norman—after all Norman’s big talk about the Pissing Monkey, it would be just horrible… Her heart was beating like a bird’s.
Ike Walsh was much shorter than he appeared to be on television. But come to think of it, he was always sitting down on 60 Minutes. He looked even more ominous, however. His perpetually tanned skin, his narrow, steely eyes, his high cheekbones, his wide jaws and low forehead, which was a stony little cliff beneath his mane of thick black hair, very thick inky black—he looked like a real savage, barely constrained by civilized clothes, his jacket and tie. Those narrow little robot eyes of his did not blink once, but, then, Norman’s didn’t, either. He seemed quite comfortable—in his patient’s chair. He wore a slight, friendly, hospitable smile. Magdalena’s heart raced even faster. Norman’s relaxed demeanor only made him look more unwary, more vulnerable, fresher and fatter for the kill.
Some sort of director began counting, “… six, five, four, three, two, one… we’re rolling.”
Walsh cocked his head to one side, the way he always did when he was setting someone up for the kill. “Now, Dr. Lewis, you say that pornography addiction is not a true physical addiction, like an addiction to alcohol or heroin or cocaine…”
He paused. A red light lit up on the camera trained on Norman…
Norman spoke! “I’m not convinced that addiction to alcohol, heroin, or cocaine is physical in the sense I take it you mean when you say the word physical. But please go ahead.”
Magdalena clasped her hands together ever so tightly and drew in her breath. Norman had maintained his hospitable smile but altered it, ever so slightly, by parting his lips and moving his lower jaw ever so slightly to one side and… and ever so slightly winking the eye on that side—winking!—not blinking—as if to say, “I’m not sure you have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, but I’m willing to overlook that. So please plod on, my boy.”
Walsh paused a couple of beats longer than Magdalena would have expected. Was he trying to decide whether or not to toss alcohol, heroin, and cocaine into the pot?
With his head still cocked to one side, he said, “But four of the most eminent psychiatrists and neuroscientists in the country—I’m tempted to say the world—couldn’t disagree with you more completely.” He glanced down at some notes on his lap. “Samuel Gubner of Harvard… Gibson Channing of Stanford… Murray Tiltenbaum of Johns Hopkins… and Ericson Labro of Washington University—who, as you must know, just won the Nobel Prize—all four have come to the same conclusion. Pornography addiction, looking at pornographic videos on the internet for hours every day, causes a chemical reaction that hooks the pornography user in precisely the same way hard drugs hook the drug user. It alters the brain in precisely the same way. All four of these eminent authorities agree one hundred percent on that.” Now the Grand Inquisitor brought his head up straight, jutted his square jaw forward almost prognathously, narrowed his cold steely eyes even more… and struck. “And so you’re telling me that Dr. Norman Lewis knows better, and those four men—including a Nobel laureate—are wrong. They’re all wrong! Is that what you’re telling me? Isn’t that what it boils down to?”
Magdalena’s heart skipped a few beats and seemed to slide inside her rib cage. ::::::Oh, poor Norman.::::::
“AahhhuhwaaaAHHHHHock hock hock hock!” Norman cut loose with as loud a burst of laughter as she had ever heard him bellow. He was beaming, as if he couldn’t be more delighted. “I know all four gentlemen, and three of them are close personal friends of mine!” He began chuckling, as if this whole train of thought were too rich for words. “As a matter of fact, I had dinner with Rick and Beth Labro a few days ago.” He chuckled again and leaned back in his chair and beamed the biggest, happiest grin in the world, as if all the planets were aligned just right.
Magdalena couldn’t believe what had come out of Norman’s mouth! “A few days ago” was a mob-scene dinner the American Psychiatric Association put on in the Javits Center in New York in honor of “Rick” Labro for his Nobel. Magdalena was with Norman the whole time. His “dinner with Rick and Beth” consisted of him standing about 214th in a receiving line of maybe 400 people waiting to shake hands with “Rick.” When Norman finally reached “Rick,” he said, “Dr. Labro? Norman Lewis, from Miami. Congratulations.” To w
hich “Rick” replied, “Thank you very much.” And that was it—“dinner with Rick and Beth”! ::::::Our table was the length of a football field away from “Rick and Beth’s.”::::::
The Grand Inquisitor shifted into his patented mode of arch irony: “I’m glad you had such a good time, Dr. Lewis, but that wasn’t—”
Cruuusssh! “AhhhHAHHHAHAHHH Hock hock hock hock ‘Good time’ doesn’t begin to describe it, Ike!”—Norman’s laughter, his booming voice, his 250-watt good humor rolled right over Ike Walsh. “It was a fabulous time! No one could possibly have a higher opinion of Rick than I do—and for that matter, Sam, Gibbsy, and Murray!” ::::::Gibbsy? I don’t think he’s ever laid eyes on Gibson Channing.:::::: “They’re pioneers in our fielddahhhHHHHHock hock hock You’re a funny guy, Ike! AhhhhHHHock hock hock!”
By the looks of him, Ike found none of this funny. His expression had gone blank. The lights had gone out in his steely eyes. He seemed to be searching for a response. Finally, he said, “All right, so now, I take it, you’re admitting that compared to these four authorities, your—”
Craaaaashhhh! Norman’s incorrigible exuberance rolled right over Ike Walsh again. “No, you are funny, Ike! You’re priceless, in my book! What I must tell you is that I’ve been treating pornography addicts, so-called, for the past ten years, and it is a disease, a mental disorder, and a very serious one in this country, even if it has little to do with the conventional notion of addiction. We’ve just completed the protocols for the largest clinical trial of so-called pornography addicts ever attempted.” ::::::What? Since when?:::::: “This will not be in the usual laboratory setting, however. We’re sending each patient home with the equivalent of a Holter monitor, and we’ll have a steady stream of data in real time as they—shall we say—surrender to their ‘addiction’ in complete privacy. The results should be monographic within eighteen months.”
“Monographic?” said Ike Walsh.
“Yes. A monograph is a treatise—you are familiar with treatise, aren’t you, Ike?”
“Yehhhs…” said the famous Inquisitor. He said it somewhat warily, as if afraid Norman were about to put him on the spot and ask him to define this word treatise, like a schoolboy.
It went on like that. Norman kept battering the Grand Inquisitor with forty-foot, fifty-foot waves of great good humor, affability, crashing laughter, and mile-high enthusiasm, glistening, flashing waves that rose and fell and masked the riptide, the undertow of condescension that swept Ike Walsh away to he knew not where from below. One of Walsh’s specialties was talking right over an interviewee who was taking the conversation down a path he didn’t like. But how do you walk right over towering, absolutely overpowering waves? After “You are familiar with treatise, aren’t you, Ike?” Ike Walsh never got control of his own show again.
The Grand Inquisitor spent the rest of the interview curled up in Norman’s lap. He got up every now and then to lob a nice fat softball of a question… and Norman hit home run after home run after home run.
What had gone on between Magdalena and Norman earlier, moments before the 60 Minutes crew arrived, still troubled her. There was something weird about it, something perverse. But my God, Norman was quick! He was brilliant! And my God, he was strong! He was a real man! He had pissed all over the fiercest, most feared interrogator in all of television… and reduced him to a little pussy.
6
Skin
His office on the French Department floor at the University was a hotel lobby compared to his office here at home, but the one here at home was a little jewel, an Art Deco jewel, to be exact, and Art Deco was French. The floor was only twelve feet by ten feet to begin, and now it looked narrow because someone had built in sets of chest-high amboyna-wood bookshelves—amboyna!—absolutely stunning!—on either side to within a few feet of the desk long before he bought the place… whose mortgage he was still struggling struggling! to pay off… you can’t imagine how hard the struggle has become! Anyway, his office at home was Lantier’s inviolate sanctuary. When he was in his office at home with the door closed, as he was at this moment, interruptions of any sort were absolument interdites.
He consciously kept this room looking monastic… no knick-knacks, no memorabilia, no clutter, no pretty little things, and that went for lamps, too… no lamps sitting on the desk, no lamps standing on the floor. The room was lit entirely by downlights in the ceiling… Austere, but this was elegant austerity. It wasn’t antibourgeois, it was haute bourgeois, streamlined. Behind Lantier’s desk was a four-foot-wide window in the form of a pair of… French… doors that swept all the way from the floor to the ceiling cornice ten feet above. The cornice was massive but smooth—streamlined instead of comprising fussy amalgamations of Vitruvian scrolls, rolls, fillets, and billets that spelled ELEGANCE in nineteenth-century haut bourgeois design, Art Deco haute bourgeoise ELEGANCE substituted the grand gesture: windows as tall as the wall… smooth massive cornices that cried out the Art Deco motto “Elegance through Streamlined Strength!” The only chair besides the one at Lantier’s desk was a small white one-piece fiberglass number by a French designer named Jean Calvin. If you insisted on being picky, Calvin was Swiss, but the name, pronounced Col-vanhhh, told you he was French Swiss, not German, and Lantier chose to regard him as French. After all, even though Lantier was by birth Haitian and had been appointed an associate professor of French (and that damnable Creole) because he was Haitian, he had proof that he was in fact a descendant of the prominent de Lantiers of Normandy in France from at least two centuries ago, maybe more. One had only to look at his pale skin, no darker than, say, a café latte, to see he was essentially European… Well, he was honest enough with himself to realize that his eagerness to feel French was what had led to his current financial jam. This house wasn’t very big or grand in any other way. But it was Art Deco!… a genuine Art Deco house from the 1920s!—one of a number built back then in this northeastern section of Miami known as the Upper East Side… not a really high-toned neighborhood but solidly upper-middle-class… lots of Cuban and other Latino business-types… white families here and there… and no Negs and no Haitians!—except for the Lantiers, and nobody up here ever pegged the Lantiers as Haitian… certainly not the Lantiers, an Everglades Global University French professor and his family in an Art Deco house… These Art Deco houses were considered rather special, Art Deco being English shorthand for Arts Décoratifs, the first form of Modern architecture—and it was French! He knew paying for it would be a stretch—a $540,000 stretch—but it was French!—and very stylishly so. Now, with a $486,000 mortgage on his back, he was paying $3,050 a month—$36,666.96 a year—plus $7,000 in annual property taxes, plus nearly $16,000 in federal income tax, all this on a salary of $86,442—there you had yourself a stretch, all right… he felt like one leg had a toehold on the edge of the cliff back there, and the other leg had a toehold on the other cliff, way out there, and in between was the bottomless Canyon of Doom. In any case, the Calvin chair had a nearly straight back and no seat cushion. Lantier didn’t want any visitor to get comfortable in here. He didn’t want visitors in here. Period. That went for his wife, Louisette, too, before she died two years ago… Why did he continue to think of Louisette at least a dozen times a day?… when every single thought of her caused him to draw in a deep breath and expel it in the form of a long sigh?… and turn his lower eyelids into two tiny ponds of tears?… as they were at this moment—
Twistflimsy clatter!—he himself had tried to fix the old handle on the cheap, damn it, and the door flew open, and there stood his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Ghislaine, yeux en noir blindingly bright with excitement, lips trying not to betray the enthusiasm that had lit up those big lovely sphères—
—yes, the door of his inviolate sanctuary flew open without so much as a preliminary knock, and there stood Ghislaine… and he didn’t even have to say it in his mind as a whole thought because in so many different situations it had come true: Where the happiness of his beautiful, pale-as-th
e-moon daughter was concerned, his patriarchal rules melted away. He immediately rose up from his chair and embraced her… then sat back on the edge of his desk so they would remain tête-à-tête.
In French she said, “Papa! I don’t know if I mentioned South Beach Outreach to you, but I’m thinking of joining!”
Lantier had to smile. ::::::Thinking of joining… try absolutely dying to join!… You’re so transparent my dear, sweet, predictable daughter. When you’re excited about something, you can’t stand taking time to build a nice little sofa of small talk for it first, can you. You have to spill it out now! don’t you.:::::: That made him smile even more.
