In Session, (12): Face Punch
The Lay Psychiatrist treats the wife of a vulture capitalist
A Lincoln town car has parked in the street — there’s never any parking in this block — and unless I miss my guess, the lady emerging, with the assistance of her Asian chauffeur, is Robin Wise, married to Barton Fetters, the crony capitalist. He has money and she has style, which is the same as money but more liquid.
She wrote her own marriage vows, which were more like stipulations than vows. “An attractive woman should not have a tail,” she wrote. “Have me followed and it’s grounds for divorce with aggravating circumstance, referenced below.” She didn’t pull any punches just because the deal came down in a church house.
“I’d like to punch him in the face,” she said, coming in the door wearing AirPods and in the middle of a conversation, so I assumed she was either on a call or off a medication. She hadn’t even looked at me yet. I tried to get her attention by flexing my muscles, which rips apart my clothes, so that they hang in tatters after I move into extension. “Oh my god,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”
When she’d settled in the yellow chair I was dazzled. “So much gold,” I said. “I feel like I’m in Iceland. I couldn’t help but overhear you say you want to punch someone in the face.”
“My husband,” she said. “I want to take him by surprise and punch him in the face. I’ve been reading Lao Tzu on the art of war. I’ll crush him like a bug, and with as little mercy. That’s not zero, but my emotional identification with bugs is limited.”
“I understand,” I said. “Emotional identification with insects is rare and curious. I am assuming that your husband manhandled you, and you were unable to defend yourself, thus this need for revenge.”
She stared at me in wonder for a few moments, then smiled. “Do you know what investment bankers do in bed?” she asked. “He calls me Lady Jane. It’s like fucking Art Garfunkel. He even plays a lyre, I swear to god he does, and he sings in this tenor that is so beautiful it makes you want to cut off his balls to preserve it. But it’s all AI enhanced. He’s this fifty year old billionaire with a cerebral implant that gives him these weird abilities. The money has literally gone to his head.”
“So, he sings like a castrati?”
“Clear and sweet as a bell,” she said. “How do you buy something like that?”
“Why do you buy something like that?” I asked. “What kind of man impersonates a castrati? What does your husband look like? I can’t find pictures of him on the internet.”
“He’s reclusive,” she said. “He has a full mane of chestnut hair on his head but his body is smooth as a girl’s. He’s plump in the hips and plump in the lips.”
“You asked if I know what investment bankers do in bed. What does your husband do in bed?”
“He sleeps,” she said. “On his stomach.” She arched one eyebrow.
“You say he sings to you? What does he sing?”
“Medieval ballads, mostly. That’s why I thought of Art Garfunkel.”
“Do you enjoy them?”
She rolled her eyes. “At first I thought I’d nudge him gently away from the madonna projection, but ‘a little whore goes a long ways’ isn’t just a children’s book, it’s a dosage warning. I was trying to wean him off his madonna fixation by showing just traces of whorishness, so subtle it would come off as cute.”
“You provided a micro dose of prurience,” I said, “like a prescribing naturopath, and it enhanced his natural immunity to whorishness, leaving him, what? Vapid? Boorish? Dogmatic? Priggish? Moralistic?”
“All those things,” she said. “He’s a Republican. His immune system sees those little traces of whorishness as foreign bodies. Probably Thai or Brazilian. It attacks every trace of impropriety, real or imagined, with antibodies.”
“Of course,” I said. “If you’d hit him with a straight out frontal assault you could have taken his whore unawares and had her in league with you in no time, but by administering a microdose of lasciviousness, you’ve set up an opposition in him to the whore he is, and doesn’t know he is.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said. “I tried being subtle and it backfired, big time. I need to shock him, but I’m afraid to use electricity. It might fry his chips. So I want to punch him in the face, really hard, when he doesn’t see it coming. But I’m afraid I’ll hurt my hand. Will you help me?”
“I have two words for you,” I said “Palm strike.”