Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Once upon a time there was a couch. A couch, hard stuffed, rounded, secure in its foundations and with its feet firmly situated on the floor.
The couch sat in the 5th story consulting room of the slight, well meaning and and warm hearted Dr Oliver James Blunt. A man who many deemed poorly named as only sensitivity seeped from his pores.
Oliver was a psychoanalyst, a Lacanian psychoanalyst to be precise. Not for him the easy translation of the psychology pop up book. No. He had trained in the carefully staked, mysterious and rigorous domain of human dynamics, most specifically the personal intersubjectivity and intra-contradictory needs of love.
On Tuesday, his client Marie Forbes arrived for her session with him, always prompt, at the time of 10.00. Oliver was reassured by the constancy of her comings and goings as regular as the rhythm of a metronome.
Often he thought this was all that they could achieve together – for her to arrive promptly at 10.00, and to leave promptly at 11.00. She was his only client on this day.
Today, as on other days, she arrived, bid him a polite and steely good morning and sat firmly occupying the complex third of the couch away from him. By her side was a large bag. As was her recent practice, she stooped to take off her shoes and stockings, released the zip of her skirt, slid her chemise over her head, and folded her undergarments from her body to sit naked before him.
Because of that pose, he had taken to turning his chair from her just slightly so that she was both in and out of his gaze. His look, so analytical and measured, gently shadowed the contours of her body, filling in the received diagnosis of missing and present limbs. She was round, fulsome, childlike and relaxed, holding her leg raised waiting for the start of their conversation.
And because of that
Today Oliver had settled a skeleton, upright, at the other end of the couch. A male, presumed by its length and width, but made of thin bones. No flesh, no pulse, no beating heart. A person designed to fill the void. An object upon which they could both look in fullness, safe and safely distant from any desires.
Oliver sensed in that frisson of placement that this was one of the best things he had ever done. He held back his breath knowing that this act was a refinement of his judgement, of his many years of deliberation about longing.
They sat in silence until finally Marie began to speak.
“Dr Oliver” she began, “I have been thinking upon your ideas about my father. i believe that I have resolved my lack of faith and investment in the male figures in my life”
She opened the case and pulled from it, crumpled, a hat, a pair of mens trousers and jacket, and a pair of black shoes. She carefully dressed the skeleton beside her, slightly adjusting the jaw to place a horn-edged pipe inside the teeth .
Having dressed him, she dressed herself, and after a careful nod in Oliver’s direction, went to the door. Turning back, she looked at the couch and murmured “Good-bye Papa. Rest Well” and left.
For Oliver, love came and left the room simultaneously.
It was 10.27am.