Cover Illustration by Hiroki Otsuka

Design by Dejana Pupovac, CSTUDIODESIGN

© 2013 Will Meyerhofer

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

First published by Dog Ear Publishing

4010 W. 86th Street, Ste H

Indianapolis, IN 46268

www.dogearpublishing.net

ISBN: 978-1-4575-1691-7

ISBN: 9781483505886

This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this book are purely fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For William Yan To Kwok:

Yes, this is also a love letter to you.

I believe when I fall in love

this time it’ll be forever.

-Stevie Wonder

About the Author

Will Meyerhofer is a psychotherapist with a private practice in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
His previous books are Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy and Way Worse Than Being a Dentist.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to:

Morgan Hufstader,

Andrea Hufstader,

Michael McManus,

Jessica Hefes,

Hiroki Otsuka,

Christine Sullivan,

Dejana Pupovac,

Dan Hilken

Viv Chou

Sydelle Kramer,

Susan Rabiner and

– always – William Yan To Kwok.

Contents

Part 1: A Stranger Comes to Town

Part 2: Happy Ending

Prologue

BAD THERAPIST

I.

The phone rang. Needless to say, I ignored it. My face was stuffed in a Korean’s ass.

Allow me to explain. His “thing” is to get “eaten out” (his term of art) while he blows me (mutually agreed-upon term of art.) He doesn’t fuck. I get to eat him out. That’s my sole option, if I want to have sex with Jae. And I often find I do.

This is strong stuff, coming from a psychotherapist. But one adapts – just as I adjusted to spending up-close time with this guy’s rump.

I own up to my pervertedness, but I also own up to a brief am-I-on-board moment – what George W. Bush might have termed a “decision point” - during my first hook-up with Jae. It passed as soon as my lovely twenty-something Korean acquaint-ance-with-benefits ran to the shower and returned all clean and Ivory-fresh.

There was little room for discussion after that, since he was sitting on my face. He bent over my cock – which adjusted to circumstances admirably - and hesitated a bit, as if to say: Okay? Ready? Get to work!

That was my cue. I took a tentative lick – making sure his behind was as dainty and immaculate as it appeared. It was. Jae’s small and slender, and his little tush jutted out like a dab of whipped cream afloat a mousse. I poked the wrinkled corrugations and hoped he liked it - nice, a wet tongue sliding around back there.

During this process, I recalled a dream from the age of fifteen – the one that confirmed my sexual orientation. I wasn’t about to risk coming out of the closet at fifteen – for obvious reasons – but I quit kidding myself after that night’s unconscious voyage. The dream consisted of sliding down a smooth pillowy hillock, a silky shiny surface, tossing and tumbling naked as the day I was born, delighted, spinning into the beckoning softness of – an ass.

I sensed at the time that the ass belonged to Tomek Koldas, the boy with whom I feigned a close adolescent friendship. I intended to anoint this Polish immigrant classmate with the sacred love of comrades, but we never achieved any such selfless spiritual bond. Nothing developed between us at all, beyond a distant mutual admiration.

Tomek consented to hang out with me because I was the smartest kid in school – and a year older – and because his mother applied a gentle push. I think he took a modicum of pride in our friendship. There was a reflected glory in intimacy with the kid who got all A’s. I, in turn, smoldered over Tomek’s lips, whose redness scattered my cognition sufficiently to leave me grasping for words. His skin resembled zupa wisniowa stirred with clotted cream. The twin-globes of his butt jutted from corduroy jeans like a thrust fault, inducing the finely furrowed fabric to bulge leeringly. It was sweet agony to endure our occasional sleep-over.

Returning to the matter at hand - my engrossed Korean companion and his overwhelming ass swallowing my horizon. I poked a bit more around the edges. Jae’s never been a talker, but that must have been what he wanted, because he took my cock in his mouth, in one decisive gulp. It felt incredible.

Jae is gorgeous - a Korean boy utterly without body hair, his skin china white and silky smooth. Thick, jet locks project over his slit eyes, which - like his red lips - arrive from nowhere, without preparation or transition, as though a blade sliced ivory flesh then parted it to produce eyes and lips. Almost repulsive but somehow very sexy. I never lost the taste for full lips.

I was jostled back to the present by sensations building in my groin. In the rising excitement, I went to town and pushed my tongue right in. That brought the Korean to a total stop on my cock. Not a stop like he didn’t like it, but a deer in the headlights stop like oh, yeah. Count to three and he was back on my dick like he couldn’t get enough. At some point I soared to the place where the only outcome was release, and let go. He whipped around a moment later, to stick his cock in my mouth. I barely noticed.

I opened my eyes and realized he was scowling at me.

“Doesn’t taste very nice, does it?” Jae has an accent.

I wasn’t sure what that meant.

It turned out he was miffed I came in his mouth. He glared self-righteously, having returned the favor. This was pay-back.

I studied the surprisingly mild taste on my tongue, and wondered at the irony of his fury at my transgression – under the circumstances.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t taking place in reality. It happened a few weeks before.

My load sailed airborne over the toilet seat, into the bowl. Some dripped from the rim. In the shadowy water it floated like living ectoplasm.

The phone was still ringing. I continued to ignore it. Give me a few minutes. I’m having a wank here.

A client was expected in my office (which doubles as a spare bedroom in my apartment) within the next ten minutes. This was cutting it close. Hence, I was standing in the bathroom instead of seated at my computer, where, in lieu of mental images of my favorite Korean hook-up, supplemented with adolescent dreams and aborted high school romances, I’d have full access to online porn snippets, including, but not limited to, highlights from “GayAsianTwinks.com.”

Bad therapist.

One final ring, and the machine got it. Earlier, I’d been listening to a client’s request to change an appointment time, so the volume was turned up. A message screeched from the tiny speaker:

“Hi, this is your congressman, Charlie Silverstein, calling to ask…” Yadda yadda.

I tuned out the rest. I never donate to politicians - except Obama, and then only when his campaign throws that lottery where, for a donation, you win a chance for dinner with the man. On occasion, I break down and try my luck, even after - when it comes time to type “psychotherapist” into the online donation form – I realize yet again the enterprise is doomed.

Gay, maybe they could handle. But consider the last batch of winners: a school teacher, a fire fighter, a postal worker and a retired vet. The President isn’t sitting down to dinner with a psychotherapist. Not anytime soon. Not in public.

You can’t hide from a therapist – not even a politician can. America knows that. And America assumes I’d ask therapist questions:

“How’s it going with the wife?” (with pause for eye contact.)

“Do you still carry angry feelings towards your father?” (ditto.)

“How do you really feel about this job?” (ditto.)

America would be correct to look on in horror, because that’s what therapists do – get to the truth.

I zoned back in, and realized there was something off about that voice message: He got his own name wrong. My congressman isn’t Charlie Silverstein. It’s Charlie Silverman.

Weird.

So, did a voice-over actor playing Silverman somehow muff his lines? Sloppy. And do they hire actors for that? Or could Silverman have gotten his own name wrong? That would look pretty bad on the cover of the Post.

The accent was off, too, which didn’t make sense. That was either a voice-over actor – or Charlie Silverman experiencing a senior moment. I summoned the image of my Congressman – late-sixties, owl-eyed, bald on the top, spreading at the waist, hunched before a podium in front of City Hall or the US Capital steps, duly intoning dull material in a monotone.

He’d been in office since the dawn of time. Was he finally losing it?

Not my problem. I deleted the message.

II.

To avoid glancing at the clock isn’t the issue. To figure out the time, you can check the client’s watch. You develop an ability to mentally invert analog faces and decode upside down digital digits.

To avoid yawning is the struggle. Yawning is hard to avoid.

(By the way – I use client and patient interchangeably. Or I try to use client because it’s less medical-sounding, but I forget, and somehow patient comes out of my mouth, just like they keep calling me “Dr. Meyerhofer” even though I’m not a doctor.)

The worse time to be seized by an attack of yawning varies with the season – but mostly you’re in trouble around 3:30 p.m. or 4:30 p.m. At that point, it might be impossible not to yawn unless you’ve taken precautions. If, like me, you’re not a coffee drinker, then I recommend imbibing a Red Bull, or some other brand of energy drink, or even just a diet Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper. In the winter, brew lots of tea. That keeps me snappy.

Candace isn’t droning – that’s not fair. She’s being boring. Perhaps she knows it – most people, doing therapy, are a little afraid they’re boring their therapist. If they’re not, maybe it’s a sign of healthy self-regard, or the fact that they’re actually not being boring, or maybe they’re arrogant and un-self-reflective and perhaps stupid and so boring there’s no helping them. File those last cases under “not smart enough to be candidates for psychotherapy” - a category we’d all like to deny exists.

But Candace isn’t boring because she’s stupid – she’s talking in circles because she doesn’t want to tell the truth. She doesn’t know that, and it’s my job to point it out. Oftentimes, the best practice is to say something honest and challenging like “this is boring – get to the truth!” but that takes guts, even if you’re a therapist. Still, it is the right thing to say. It proves you’re listening and confirms the client’s own sense that they’re boring you. Which they are. And it establishes that you’re going to tell the truth, and not bullshit them. Leading by example.

So saying something like that would likely be a relief for all involved, and yet somehow I’m nodding along as Candace describes her awful mother for the umpteenth time and her dread of returning to Ohio to visit her.

Why aren’t I doing a better job? Because I’m sneaking glances at Candace’s watch, trying to deduce the time without being obvious about it by turning my head to glance at the wall clock. My sense is we’re almost done. And I truly suck because all I want is to be done.

Bad therapist.

III.

At the Monday night therapy group Mitch was talking about anxiety. I ran with the ball.

“How many people in here are, by a show of hands, you know, freaking the fuck out?”

Tory, bless her soul, shot her hand up. She’s twenty-two, hard-core goth, steeling herself to move out of her parents’ house and find her first job. And freaking the fuck out.

The others looked at me askance. My stab in the dark – fit of spontaneity – failed to win over.

Jacob nailed it: “From the way you said that, Will, it sounds like you’re the one freaking the fuck out.”

He followed that with an annoyingly perfect summary of everything I’ve taught him.

At twenty-eight, Jacob’s been out of work for three months with weak prospects ahead and the real possibility of moving back in with mom and dad. He says he’s working hard to stay in the moment, take it day by day, reality-test his thinking and formulate soothing counter-thoughts. He’s going to do just fine. There’s nothing coming that he can’t handle.

He sounded good.

Bad therapist. Good client.

Maybe I am the one freaking the fuck out.

At the Wednesday night group, the energy felt muted. I used a standard intervention from my songbook:

“Who’s not in the room tonight? Who’s somewhere else, in their head, staring out the window, living in yesterday or tomorrow, not here and now?”

There was the standard pause, but this time it felt vaguely accusatory. Once again, I’d gone a little too far and managed to describe myself instead of them.

Another message on my answering machine from “Charlie Silverstein.” How do you get your own name wrong on two messages in a row? I erased it after the first few words. Annoying there’s no “do not contact” list. This is my office phone – for clients, not lame political robo-calls.

IV.

Christmas, up at Westchester. In the driveway, standing around in light snow with my brother, who’s also a therapist.

“Three of my clients lost their jobs this month. Big finance guys.” Jon’s voice radiates impatience. “It’s a bitch.” He’s bent over, checking something under the bumper of his fancy-ass Mercedes. On closer inspection, he’s just scraping snow off the back lights. It’s brand new – my brother’s cars are always brand-new because he has a leasing set-up with a car dealer friend.

We’re out here because Jon habitually disappears from the living room at Christmas at Mom’s place and paces around outside. I said I’d go look for him, which was my way of riding on his coattails.

Now Jon’s staring into space, frosty breath leaking from his lips in a slow thermal braid. My guess is he wants me to leave him alone, but I don’t feel like going back inside either.

“I’m seeing a lot of that, too – clients getting laid off,” I offer.

I don’t mention the fact that Jon’s clients are hedge-fund managers from New Canaan, and I’m treating twenty-something hipsters from Williamsburg. Jon moved up here first, to upper Westchester, then Mom followed. Overall he got what he came for – wealthy Greenwich types – expensive divorces, drawn-out custody battles, kids with ADHD, mistresses – grist for the mill of a booming suburban psychotherapy practice.

I stayed in New York. The logical thing would have been for me to become a “gay therapist” - one of those guys with an office in Chelsea and ads featuring rainbow flags and glossy photos of the therapist trying to appear hunky and empathetic at the same time.

I never became a “gay therapist,” in that stereotypical sense. Instead, I got exiled by rising rents to Battery Park City and mutated into the therapist-of-choice for the-friends-of-the-gays – women working in theater or fashion, or rich, frustrated bankers’ wives or ex-wives, or straight guy roommates or colleagues or buddies of gay guys. The men I see are mostly young and straight and don’t care if I’m neither. I suspect many see me because they work downtown and it’s convenient. At forty-two, I’m old-ish and sexless to them. Just a therapist.

My gay clients are downtown-or Brooklyn-dwellers with jobs and families identical to the straights – usually minus the kids, but then most of my straight clients don’t have kids either. Gay or straight, they hold jobs at banks or PR firms or fashion houses or online start-ups as programmers or marketers or analysts or what-not. With the gays, I see a smattering of clichéd dysfunction, like steam room action at the gym, nights wasted cruising for sex on Grindr, or misadvised three-ways. But the surprise working with the straights was discovering pretty much the same stuff. And I was surprised how into kink they are - endless subs and doms and leather and anal.

I’d be pretending if I said there was any real difference between the gays and straights in my practice. The only discernible divergence is around monogamy. Straights aim towards it as a much vaunted if unobtainable ideal. For the gays, it seems more like an unresolved issue up for discussion.

The not-quite-gay-therapist set-up suits me. I’m gung ho on gay rights, but never would have fit in with the Chelsea crowd. I’m a jazz head, never cared for musicals or operas, and don’t have the money to pull off Fire Island. I probably wouldn’t go if I did. I spent a day out there last summer - a party in the Pines thrown by a wealthy old rice queen I met at a bar. His pool was stocked with young Asian guys splashing about like so many koi. The Asians were there for the house, the rice queen was there because he’s got issues - and I felt like fleeing.

Maybe I like working with straights because it’s easier hearing about dysfunction from the other side of the fence. I can own up to Jewish self-loathing, so the existence of a little gay self-loathing wouldn’t be a stretch.

My brother hasn’t said anything. Now he announces, “I’m going to walk up the street and back. I hate this shit.” And he departs. I head back inside, to the warmth of my mother tormenting my step-sister over her latest divorce.

V.

That night, when I get home, there’s an email from “Charlie Silverstein.” My pulse jumps – a famous client could be a breakthrough. Is he the Congressman? I flash back to that movie – The President’s Analyst, with James Coburn. I think I saw it twice, as a kid – they used to run junky old movies after school on the local UHF station.

But why the wrong name again? And why now, after two back-to-back robo-calls? Maybe I’m wrong about the name. I Google it, and yes, it’s Charlie Silverman, and he’s in Congress. Just as I remember – the same older Jewish guy I glimpsed on news snippets, declaiming over a tottering portable lectern on the Capital steps. His district covers the west side of Manhattan, with a bite taken out where the east side district muscles in near TriBeCa – actually in Battery Park City. So I’m not even in his district. I think they changed the map last year. That’s right – now I have the Latina woman from the East Side – the one who, via some unlikely wrinkle, also ended up with a chunk of Brooklyn populated by Orthodox Jewish black hats. I shouldn’t be getting robo-calls from this guy - I should be getting them from the Latina lady. I remember receiving a few of her calls after they changed the districting.

Something smells fishy. Is this a prank? Some kind of pathological liar? The scenario wouldn’t be atypical. I’ve run into it before – a client who was dating a man who claimed to be a state senator from Arizona, but the whole thing was a fake. The lies got wilder and wilder – again, typical - until she caught on. Maybe I’ve stumbled on the same thing – or something even weirder.

The message sounds sincere, but then, that’s what you’d expect from a pathological liar:

“Dr. Meyerhofer, my name is Charlie Silverstein. You’ve probably heard of me. I’ve heard of you, and was wondering if we could set up a phone session some time?”

That’s it. A private email address – nothing .gov about it.

Oh, and it’s dated Christmas Day, time-stamped 3:07 p.m.. That’s strange. Jews are supposed to do Chinese food and a movie. My mother’s husband isn’t Jewish – or religious – so she’s thrown a sort-of Jewish what-the-hell Christmas for ages. But isn’t it a bit over-the-top, Jewish-wise - or just anything-wise – to contact a therapist for an appointment at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day?

VI.

In his email, Silverstein says he wants a phone session – not Skype or Google video chat or iChat – just the phone. That adds an extra dose of weird, since I won’t be able to see him, but in his reply he brushes my concerns aside with “you know what I look like” and his own issues about confidentiality and “discretion.” I get it, he’s a US Congressman – sure, I’ll be discreet. But then I start to get freaked out about my own legal issues.

There’s this whole licensing nightmare in NY State where the year I got my masters degree a new law went into effect requiring endless years of supervision and exams and so on. This Silverman thing spooks me since the last thing I need is a snafu with Albany and the licensing boards, especially some kind of fuck-up involving a US Congressman seeing me as a client.

Silverman didn’t ask about insurance, but what if he files for reimbursement and somehow or other I do something wrong – like put the wrong procedure code in. I’ve never bothered figuring out if it’s true – as one of my colleagues claims – that there’s a rule against doing first sessions on the phone, or that there’s a separate procedure code for telephone sessions. I’ll have to come up with a diagnosis, too – fill in a code for “general anxiety disorder” or something innocuous along those lines on his receipt, if he’s planning to submit it for insurance. I have to get this stuff right – I don’t need hassles. Silverman’s a Congressman, so his insurer would be the federal government, probably. On the other hand, if he’s freaking out about “discretion” there’s no way he’d file for reimbursement, and he’s rich, so he doesn’t need to anyway. Would he risk mailing a check? A money order?

Oh, and he asked for an evening session - “preferably your last session of the day.”

So there’s a lot of hassle here. I gave him my 8 p.m. slot on Thursday. He’d better pay a lot. I wonder if I could ask for more than two hundred dollars with a straight face and he’d cough it up. Maybe two-fifty? Would that be pushing it? Would I sound like I’m milking a famous client for the money?

Bad therapist.

Or would I look like a clown asking for less?

Then it dawns on me. This whole thing is a scam. It has to be. He’s still got his own name wrong on the emails. It says Silverstein, not Silverman.

Now what?

VII.

“Hi, Dr. Meyerhofer?”

“Hello. Charlie? You can just call me Will.”

“Sure, Dr. Meyerhofer – I mean Will. Of course.”

Silence. I switch off a lamp in my office, sit down in one of my therapy chairs, slip off my shoes and prop my feet up on the other chair. That’s the glory of phone sessions – they can’t see you.

“So, how do I start?”

“Whatever’s comfortable for you, Charlie.”

“Well, maybe you can talk about you, to start.”

“That would be fine, but this is supposed to be your hour – your space to talk about yourself.”

“Oh. Right.”

His voice is wrong for the part. That’s the dead give-away. The weird thing is that it’s kind of a sexy voice – high and reedy. He sounds young, and Japanese. It’s not the Korean! No, this isn’t the Korean. Jae’s weird, but not that weird.

It was a frankly enticing voice, and the accent was impossible to place – maybe South Asian, or Middle-Eastern?

I decided to play along. There was nothing to lose – I’d already, with a weary sigh of resignation, given up on earning any money. But pathological liars are an interesting phenomenon - one more bizarre manifestation of unconscious sadism. They discharge aggression – and self-gratify – by fooling other people. The ultimate goal is getting caught in a lie, but not until they’ve upped the ante and stretched the truth to an absurd degree. In other words, the game is not getting caught until they’re ready, and then on their terms. It’s a control thing.

I realized I shouldn’t have played along with this farce – should have sent an email saying I didn’t think it would be a good idea to see this guy. But I was getting pulled in, too – sheer curiosity, coupled with the cat and mouse game, the fact he didn’t know that I knew when he thought I didn’t know he knew.

The weird part is that something feels wrong from square one. It doesn’t feel like a prank, or a sadistic game, or a pathological liar at all. It doesn’t feel like that dynamic. I can’t get a grip on what’s going on. A young foreign kid calls me, posing as an old US Congressman, a party hack – to do psychotherapy?

Which is why some part of me is afraid to take the leap, and call him out. Somehow, I want to be absolutely sure this isn’t really a Congressman. But of course it isn’t. It’s…what is it? What weird rabbit hole have I fallen into? I steel myself.

“Charlie?”

“Yes?”

“I think we need to start with something that doesn’t seem right to me.”

“Oh,” he releases a sigh that’s drawn out like a high reedy whistle. “Okay.” He sounds resigned. The game’s up. That didn’t take much.

“You know the Congressman for the western part of Manhattan is Charlie Silverman, not Charlie Silverstein. And he’s not even my Congressman down here in Battery Park City. But I’ve been getting voice messages from a Congressman Charlie Silverstein for days now. And then you emailed asking for an appointment, acting as though you were a Congressman.”

“Yeah.” Not a question, not resistance, not even resignation, not anything, just yeah.

“Well, what’s with all that? What’s going on here?”

I hear him let out another long, whistling breath. “It’s just, I wanted to see you.” He added hastily, “For a visit. I wasn’t sure how to go about it.”

This has me rolling my eyes.

“Well, how about the usual way – email me to set up an appointment, then show up?”

“That wouldn’t really work for me.”

My mind riffled through the possibilities – he’s in jail, he’s in a mental hospital, he’s underage, he’s broke…

“Why, Charlie? Is that your real name – Charlie?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Maybe I should just come over there and show you.”

I started to say, “Well, we can set up an appointment for you to come here in person…”

But then a rectangular section of the wall in my office began to glow and popped open like a door slightly ajar. The glowing doorway was located over the couch, and passed right through a piece of artwork – a painting, which opened up with it. I had the thought – will it be damaged? - but the door disappeared and everything looked good as new an instant later.

He was slight, about 5’6”, with light blue skin, a triangular head and the most enormous – as in out-of-scale to his face - narrow, orange eyes.

“Hey,” he hopped down off the couch and offered a frail-looking hand with four slender fingers, each tipped with a dark green iridescent fingernail. “What’s up?”

Chapter one

THE NIGHT WE MET

As you can imagine, things grew curiouser - and more interesting - after that.

Beginnings acquire resonance – especially when you’re embarking upon a relationship. In couples counseling, there’s often a juncture in the early sessions when things turn sour and the clients shut down or snap away to little purpose. That’s when I steer them, as best I can, to the point of origin. The method is to inquire, all innocence: “So how did you guys meet?” If there were ever strengths in evidence – some mutual respect or attraction - they must have been there during the first date. By transporting a couple back to an era when they discussed issues rather than hurled attacks, I attempt to determine how they once believed it could work.

So I pose the innocent question – and things soften. Picture a shy exchange of smiles, as they assure me they met under the craziest circumstances. I won’t believe it.

I’ve been around a while. Try me.

Anyway… so that’s how Sherwin and I met – under the craziest circumstances. I told you you wouldn’t believe it.

His real name isn’t Sherwin, of course. It’s something unpronounceable (written out, it’s along the lines of “Tzai-uorli-guo-jirngum-dah.”) Originally, he wanted me to call him “Shlomo” - which is a long story I’ll get around to in a bit.

It’s hard to run the tape back slowly like this, since it all went by in a blur. I stared at him – like, literally stared, with my eyes running over his entirety again and again, taking in the whole package. My mind was spinning at about three thousand rotations per second. It’s not so much like running a tape, playing our first meeting back – it’s more a reconstruction job, like when the witness tells the jury exactly what he saw that night, but in reality he’s piecing together what he must have seen based on how he must have felt, now that he’s going back to think about it.