FANTASY’S PROFESSION
“I’M LEAVING, I’ve never been so insulted in my life!” cried the matron, leaping from her chair. “I didn’t pay to be insulted!”
“You certainly did.” Dr. Stanler looked blankly across his desk at her. “You paid to be insulted by the truth.”
“Well, I’m leaving!” At the door she angrily awaited an apology.
“Yes, now—leave, please.” His slate-blue eyes stayed blank and, after a pause, she went out, slamming the door.
Stanler pressed the intercom. “Miss Carter, that radio man may come in now.” Waiting, he had no need to set his face for the publicity encounter. Still under thirty, Stanler had a deep vertical line down each cheek, like a slashed dimple, and this sufficed to give him the frightening dignity of an ancient Cherokee chief.
The man who entered was forty desperately pushing twenty, his long black hair carefully groomed into ragged disorder. A variety of love beads clacked softly across his breast. He even had the open-mouthedness of youth, his jaw more slackly controlled than the portable tape recorder gripped by his left hand. A fool, Dr. Stanler saw.
Stanler said, “Glad to see you, Mr.—”
“—Toby Woolton.”
“By all means, yes.”
Woolton set the recorder on the desk. “Always like getting right down to business,”
“Yes, I don’t have much time either, Mr. Woolton, so do shoot away.”
“Well then—” He carefully adjusted the little microphone between them. “I am in the office of Dr. Ronald Stanler, the famous, the almost notoriously famous therapist.”
“Ah no,” Stanler broke in, “not a therapist, I don’t claim to cure people. They come here, you might say, to be insulted.”
Woolton was pleased. “Insulted, that seems the idea! Then you don’t cure people?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that either. I said I don’t claim to cure people. How they absorb what I say is up to them.”
“Then, while we’re into a debunking spree, doctor, may I point out that you are neither a doctor of medicine nor psychology!”
“Again—I never claimed to be. My doctorate’s in art teaching, but about two years ago I realized I’d make a better living telling people the bad news about themselves.”
Woolton put a clipping on the desk. “You didn’t state that at the beginning of your career.”
“Nobody asked me. When they started to, I told them. I see you’ve researched thoroughly, that was my first ad. Ran it many times.”
“Hardly more than a classified,” Woolton told the microphone. “The little headline reads, ‘See Yourself as Others See You!’ Then it says, ‘For ten dollars an hour I will look at you and listen to you and tell you what I think are your bad features. No solutions offered, only the starkest, worst side of you, the things not even your best friends will tell you.’ And that brought in customers right away?”
“Customers—there’s the proper word! Yes, a trickle, then with word-of-mouth more of them. Only one thing’s different today.”
“What would that be?”
“I now charge forty dollars.”
“And they’re back week after week for that?”
Stanler chuckled. “A few weeks, anyway. Usually isn’t that much more really bad stuff to tell after a few encounters, matter of fact, I’m usually the one who insists they stop coming, to end our mutual boredom.”
“You seem remarkably cold about your clients, doctor—”
“Oh, I suppose you could put it like that, but affection doesn’t give useful insights. ‘Cold’ analysis can, treating people as objects of inquiry.”
Woolton pounced. “Suicides, you know several patients—pardon me, doctor—several clients, three, they say, are believed to have committed suicide after consulting you.”
“They could have hardly done so relevantly to this interview before consulting me, could they? We needn’t exaggerate, though. If I told you your principal defect so far spotted is a desperate need to cling to youth, well, if I said that, you wouldn’t be likely to commit suicide just because it seems true, now would you?” Stanler caught himself up short. Going too far with this upstart. “Of course, Mr. Woolton, I shouldn’t have said that—our whole chat could go down the drain.”
Woolton frowned, then grinned. “You’re likely to be proven wrong in at least my case, doctor. Well then, what gives you the skill at probing weaknesses some claim for you?”
“Some? Most ex-clients swear by, not at me. Personal recommendations have been my greatest booster, so, generally speaking, I may have done them good after all.”
“Well, the skill—”
“Ah yes!” He pointed at a row of cartoon portraits running all around the room. “Unlike many art teachers, I actually had some talent. But a limited, very unbalanced one—not works of art, just of cleverness. Poor draftsmanship, indifferent composition, etcetera—one single talent, the ability to see a face’s weak point and bring it violently forward. Even in the most beautiful face.”
“But what basically gives you that special knack?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea,” he abruptly lied.
Fortunately, Woolton had already lost interest in that angle. “Listeners, I wish you could see ‘em. One female physiognomy has an enormous, slightly lopsided nose. Next to it a grinning man is revealing enough teeth to fill a piano keyboard. Another woman’s face revolves around a beauty mark filthily under a nostril.” He hesitated, then, as invariably happened with Startler’s subjects, Woolton had to pick his own scab. “You said I look like a perpetual juvenile.”
“Try to look like one.” He shrugged. “I don’t know you well enough to say more—not much time available—and it would just end all chance of this being broadcast, wouldn’t it?”
Woolton stopped the recorder. “Nothing will be deleted,” he snapped.
“Then I may listen tonight”—Stanler nodded—”as I sometimes did before I became so busy.”
Woolton restarted the recorder. The interview went on for about ten minutes, then Stanler pleaded the press of business. After Woolton had packed up and gone he closed his eyes and stared at the dark. In five minutes, one more lout to consider. Of course, a little publicity wasn’t essential, but it could help. Some extra clients would mean a thousand per week after all expenses, and eventually fees could rise again. A few years of this amiable rot meant enough capital to retire from any further bourgeois nonsense.
And it was such an honest living. Every other livelihood involved countless deceptions, but no lies here except for a few negatives ones, things presently left unsaid. For instance, he couldn’t very well—as yet—admit to hitting on nontherapeutic therapy while a nightclub comic used him as a convenient butt for one-liners. How he had kept topping them to the drunken audience’s delight! Finally, the abusive filth becoming a nuisance, he’d squelched this comic in a cold voice: “You know, pal, during insults your face hangs to the left in a way that could have been more useful in a lower, less public part of your anatomy.” The audience had roared at it as just more meaningless pornography but the clown, all too obviously impotent in Stanler’s intuition, had eased himself off the floor, bested. No, that triumph couldn’t be openly admitted now—nor the other thing.
He blinked his eyes twice. Exactly three o’clock, time for the next customer. “Send in Foster,” he told Miss Carter.
Foster, short, plump and jolly-looking, bounced in to tell how everyone in his apron business was trying to cheat or insult him. The recital proceeded for half an hour while his face became progressively more repulsive. Foster had been ugly the first time, two months ago, but now his intensified un-sightliness told Stanler the moment of truth was at hand. He raised a finger and the flow of Foster’s complaints slowed. Then, when the finger stayed erect, Foster stopped altogether.
“I’ve really heard enough crap from you,” Stanler said. “You’re the one who’s cheating. You’ve carried competitiveness to a psychotic endpoint, Foster, all because your height bugs you. Well, although half the male population’s no taller than you, I, too, find you an extraordinarily small man. No, no, don’t start protesting, because I know what I see. Always you’ve avoided admitting how small you feel by making everyone else feel that way. Well, don’t start trying it here—your silly height obsession’s your problem, no longer mine!’’
After Foster departed, Stanler prepared to leave himself. Miss Carter was already gone and this was one of those unfortunate days with no late customers. But keeping Foster-types for longer periods would have been a boring decline in standards—and anyway, soon unnecessary.
He dialed Mrs. Hinten’s number and she answered in her clipped, pseudo-British accent. He said, “Mr. Rachelson here, Ada.”
Her voice bubbled back to its proper side of the Atlantic. “Hi, Abe! An hour appointment for later?”
“Well, yes and no—an hour but now—strike while the iron’s hot.” She giggled. “Six thirty?”
“Oh, excellent, that’s excellent—a slow period!”
“—and the rates accordingly fifteen percent lower?”
“Ten, naughty!” she corrected. “Ten percent. We’ll be ready for you.”
Her brownstone, like her accent, was a compromise between social forces, he thought, buzzing the ground-floor bell; it was situated on the line between a high-rent residential district and a medium-rent commercial one. She answered the door herself, nodding a huge platinum wig at him. “Good to see you, Abe.” He shook hands with her, passing the forty-five dollars to her moist palm. She promptly stuffed the money into her bosom, less, he suspected, for any practical reason than for the sluttish excitation it gave to the clientele.
Two girls wearing only bras and panties were seated on a velvet sofa at the far end of the basement corridor. One was black-haired, with blue eyes made mistily sexy by astigmatism, the other a Puerto Rican type with peroxided hair and a gaze of utter indifference that he always found stimulating. He chose the peroxide specimen and they moved into a bedroom where they both went through a series of mechanical gestures that he arranged to climax just as the hour was ending. He swiftly dressed, gave the girl a five-dollar tip and shushed her as she absently began thanking him.
Going out, he had to listen once more to Ada saying, “With a phone number, Abe, not even your real name, just a phone number, I could call whenever something special pops in and you could get more off-hour discounts, too—”
“No, dear lady,” Stanler answered, “permit me to remain as anonymous as possible as long as possible. Until next week.”
Feeling relieved now of all potential sexual tension, Stanler went home and carefully bathed his body clean of whatever contact traces might remain. He ate the coq au vin left by his housekeeper, then, with the regulation Scotch and soda on his end table, set a pile of Scarlatti records in the stereo machine and spent several hours reading sentimental claptrap by Freud. It was always amusing to see how each ostensibly new, “revolutionary” therapy repeated the fundamental error of all its predecessors.
At ten his timer switched from records to FM for Woolton’s Show. Its theme was a syncopated Bach fugue tinkled out on a player piano while Woolton sang lyrics about “The show with the brainy sound.”
The instant this song ended Woolton came on, leaving no second free of his presence. “Woolton says—and hello to you, my thinking public out there!—did you ever hear the one about the guy who got rid of his migraine headache by paying somebody to hit him on the head with a ball-peen hammer? Well, there are such guys—and gals—in this town, handing over hard cash for purely verbal blows to the psyche, and the place they go to is the office of Dr. Ronald Stanler. But don’t laugh, not completely anyway, because, Mr. and Mrs. Thinking Public, some of these folks actually say it works! Decide for yourself!”
With that he launched into the interview, and Stanler could remember nothing he had said that was now omitted save for the brief slip-up about Woolton’s perpetual juvenility. Afterward, Woolton took over again: “Well, somehow the milk of human kindness is preferable to mechanical indifference and you may even wonder why such things are permitted but—” he hesitated for emphasis and Stanler thought how this pseudo-cynic was as big an idiot as all the others—”but your ever-earnest reporter did manage to find a few people who had been patients—oops! I mean customers—of Dr. Stanler and all indicated they’d been helped and that he actually refused to keep them on indefinitely as high-paying clients! So add another wing to that supremely vast educational institution, the School of Hard Knocks—at least for some people.
“But now, to get another taste into our mouths, here’s a supremely kind lady who has just returned from six heartrending months of aiding coca addicts in the Andean highlands. That’s the highland zone of Peru and Ecuador and it’s not cocoa but c-o-c-a.”
There were no further references to “Ball-peen Hammer Psycho-Theatrics,” but Stanler was pleased by what he had already heard; it could bring in the extra customers he desired.
And it did. The next day he acquired two clients and the day after, as if extra time were needed before such a cold plunge, five came in. All offered the possibility of insights that might be temporarily interesting and, in three cases, even amusing.
But the broadcast brought a further, less useful form of attention. A convention of psychiatrists was meeting at a nearby resort, and it seemed as if all five hundred delegates had heard the interview. These doctors were divided into about fifty schools of psychotherapy, ranging from traditional Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians and Rankians through electronic processors of sex acts and Jesuit confessors to group-care and love-scream advocates, but all managed to agree on a resolution condemning Stanler’s approach.
“. . . manifestly dangerous and pernicious . . . warranting closest scrutiny by the legal authorities . . . improper claims to therapeutic value . . . public should be warned . . .” The whole long statement was in this vein, and Stanler found himself besieged by news people demanding his reaction.
“To avoid wasting time on your stupid nonsense questions,” he told them, always to their pleased what-a-curmudgeon reaction, “I am making one statement to everybody: I have never bothered to attack any of the one hundred and sixty-nine mutually contradictory schools of psychotherapy’s claims to cure people, so I cannot see why they bother to attack me when I make no claims to cure anyone. I myself will say nothing more, advising you instead to contact my former clients. All possibilities of libel action by me against anything they say are hereby renounced. Maybe I’ll be denounced, maybe not, but gentlemen, I assure you I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and good day to you.”
The news people protested that former patients would never come forward, so his challenge had to be a bluff. But come forward they did. Within two days a score had been interviewed and, while some said they disliked Dr. Stanler personally and never cared to see him again, all, whether liking or disliking him, insisted their sessions with him had been of great value. For Stanler, in every case where a name was volunteered, it instantly and intimately evoked the former patient. The intimacy always involved weaknesses that had been at first deplorably human and, at the last, merely disgusting. But here they were, supporting him. It would be most touching, Stanler decided, if he could be touched.
More new customers signed up at higher fees than ever, and he found room for them by brutally curative dismissals of some current ones. There was no more time for receiving calls of idle inquiry. However, Miss Carter did feel it necessary to pass on the one name. “Very persistent,” she explained. “The woman’s been on the line again and again, a Mrs. Hinten.”
“Fame, like everything else, is a cross to bear,” he muttered. “Thank you so much, Miss Carter.”
When Stanler reached her on his private line, she said:
“Naughty, naughty—I always said it! Claiming Abe was your name!”
“Well, Mrs. Hinten?”
She was breathlessly pleased with her insight “I just wanted to congratulate you—all those newspaper items, and TV, too!—on your wonderful work. It’s always been the same with my best girls for the customers, they don’t gush, they don’t throw their hearts into it, they’re technicians. Controlled indifference, that’s what does their job best—and yours too!”
“The parallel may be overdrawn,” he sighed, “but, Mrs.—uh—yes, Mrs. Hinten, perhaps there’s something to what you say. Right now, though, I’m most pressed, so until—”
“One thing’s certain,” she exclaimed. “No matter what, I’ll never discuss your patronage. Anybody doing so much to fight suffering deserves every consideration!”
“I don’t know how to thank you enough, Mrs. Hinten, I am deeply touched,” he said, “so until another time—”
Putting down the receiver, he knew there was unlikely to be another time; the madame was as gushy as the average clubwoman. It was funny, though, to see how universal the misunderstanding (indifference, she’d actually said indifference!) could be.
By the last day of the psychiatrist’s convention, the doctors were forced to take into account the published encomiums to Stanler’s rough methods. This was achieved by appointing a study committee of seven delegates to investigate Stanler’s approach in detail before pressing further for legal action. “As already stated, we are sure the procedures indicated involve perils,” a spokesman explained to the press, “but, being scientists, we are interested in learning anything of potential value, no matter where it may be found.”
A photograph of this committee appeared in several newspapers. Looking at it, Stanler felt certain that one middle-aged doctor, a Jungian analyst, was largely homosexual and that both the aging Freudian and the chemotherapy enthusiast were obsessional neurotics. So when the group requested a meeting he readily agreed on the following Sunday.
Upon their arrival in his office he had to revise one assessment from largely to totally homosexual, but the previous, more ambiguous category did not remain empty as the doctors settled into chairs facing the desk; the leader of group-hysteria sessions, a surprisingly young fellow, was obviously deviant, from the slight limpness of his wrists to the infantile pout of his lips. Three other doctors remained undetermined quantities and he did not have time to determine what was wrong in their cases. One, a neat woman, was an advocate of cybernetic computer models for the ailing psyche. Another, in his late fifties, was a Catholic psychiatrist, and the third one, as young as the group-hysteria man, had been described in one newspaper as a “Marxist Revisionist Psychotherapist.”
“You have come to learn something about me,” Stanler smiled. “The reverse is already true.”
They laughed and the Jungian, evidently temporary chairman, said: “We’re not here because we’re impressed with your methods but because we’re impressed with your results and want to bridge the gap if possible. I have a feeling that, whatever your professed philosophy might have been, you’d be good at treating people. How did you develop what talent you have?”
Stanler shrugged. “I don’t know much about that myself, just enough.” He pointed at the caricatures which had attracted everyone’s attention. “Mine—just have a knack for spotting people’s weakest points.”
“Ah,” put in the Freudian, “but all talent is rooted in a life history. Something in the past. Your parents, for examp—”
“No, I doubt it, they were killed in a plane crash when I was fifteen—I’m now about double that—away at prep school then—”
“Ah, the great shock,” persisted the same doctor.
“No great shock. Mildly upset naturally, but I quickly got over that. There was enough money left to put me through college.” He sighed. “Gentlemen, I’ve had no shock in life, and I’m not interested in wasting everybody’s time on fruitless biographical details.”
“Agreed!” said the cybernetics lady. “We need less psychotherapies, more recognition that the mind’s a very involved electrochemical circuit in the present, a circuit of which we understand, so far, only several diagrams. You’ve hit on a few truths about this wiring, Doctor, and shown the superiority of valid technique over ineffective, well-intentioned ‘love’ as a curative approach.”
The group therapist’s nose twitched for a sneeze, but Stanler knew from well-worn lines appearing around his nostrils that the sneeze would, as usual, remain unachieved. “Ah-ah—” said the man—”well! We may often try to bring out aggressions but they must end in affection between the group members—not some coldly technical mutual manipulation of psyches!”
“No hasty conclusions!” cried the Revisionist. ‘Technique becomes all-important if devoted to a decent social goal. The ideal for a therapy system is to develop techniques so adequate to patients’ problems that any therapist-worker can automatically apply them.”
“Oh, no!” moaned several doctors.
“Oh, yes!” put in the chemotherapist. “Would you rather have a heart operation performed by a relative or by a skilled surgeon indifferent to you as a person? But our ‘revolutionary’ friend here, dragging out all our dirtiest linen before Mr. Stanler, is actually as verbal as the rest of you. Only fully developed psychochemical treatments will permit cures by a doctor who’s totally indifferent emotionally!”
Stanler let the wrangling continue for about ten minutes more, then slammed the desk for silence. “Some committee! I’ve seen about enough. Believe me, it’s not that complicated—I simply have a talent for identifying people’s shortcomings so clearly that they see what I see. And none of you have the slightest understanding of what I’ve just said!”
The accusation of nonunderstainding, the ultimate in professional insults, brought angry retorts from everyone. “Nonsense! . . . Everything has a reason! ... A charlatan, I said it all along! . . . God gave us— . . . Poor eating habi— ... Inferiority complex parading as utter self-confi— . . . Reactionary obscurant—” Stanler could almost feel their resentment as a solid wall closing in on him.
Suddenly disgust was too overwhelming for amusement and, before he could stop himself, he snapped: “Indifference? What did ‘technical’ indifference ever achieve? The only way to have useful insights into these people, any people, is to hate them—and I hate them all!”
A mistake, he thought, considering their stunned expressions; he had lost control and now they would surely find some law— But they were beginning to smile a little —knowing smiles of superiority—and then all looked unsurprised. “Utterest nonsense!” said the first to recover. “The one thing you can’t cure anyone with ever is hate, all schools of thought know that much. And you know it, too, Stanler, as well as any of us.”
“Right,” several doctors murmured, starting to get up.
Stanler watched them leave, then stared into the convenient darkness of his eyelids. Nothing would be done against him; the world’s ultimate secret could safely be exposed and still remain a secret. When he opened his eyes again the one true world was still out there, and he felt the grin on his face become painfully, pleasurably, co-equal with that of his skull.