COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE

They drank, mostly.

He drank vodka martinis. Vodka cranberries, Dark and Stormies, Moscow Mules, Stella Artois, shots of tequila. He drank haphazardly, he mixed his liquor, he blacked out, started arguments, got cut off.

Alice drank whiskey and scotch almost exclusively, switching to a light beer later in the night. Easier on the system. No tequila, and never clear liquor. God, Denis could drink.

The bar where they met was called the Whitehorse. Not the Dylan Thomas White Horse on Hudson, but the Whitehorse Tavern on Bridge Street, near the Staten Island Ferry. Two floors, a steam table for lunch, $2.75 Yeunlings all day, and a 16-oz can of PBR plus a shot of well liquor for $3.

She stopped in regularly after making deadline. All the reporters stopped in somewhere, so it wasn’t an alkie thing, she was pretty sure it wasn’t, she just had to calm down. After all, did she not work hard all day?

Her editor at the paper two blocks away hated her far more than he hated his other reporters. And so in the mornings, around 11:30 or so, she knelt in the newsroom’s north bathroom, rested her elbows on the toilet seat, tied her hair back, and waited. Sometimes she threw up before work or in garbage cans on subway platforms on the way. You could say that her stress manifested itself physically.

Her female coworkers enjoyed yoga, HBO, and high-stakes games like Moving In With Your Boyfriend, and Getting Engaged Before 30. Meanwhile, when her thoughts wandered, it was mostly to things like: Was the 8th floor high enough? It wasn’t like she was that depressed. It was just a thought, just an intrusive thought.

That particular day at the White Horse – her story that day had been about Hero Dogs, which was at least better than Hero Cop – she sat down and ordered a Johnnie Black, neat. The World Cup was in progress, so there was that to pay attention to. She preferred to take her daily constitutional alone, but that day, she felt the man on the next barstool watching her, trying to steal a moment of eye contact. She faced straight ahead and studied the newspaper.

He must have seen an opening, though, a crack in her façade.

“What do you think about the game,” he asked.

She shrugged. “France, I guess.”

Turning to look at him, she was startled by how oddly handsome he was. He had a lineless, youthful face, and combined with tousled white hair. He must have lost his color early, but it suited him, gave him an otherworldly appearance. He smiled at her, the kind of smile that said, Isn’t this ridiculous? as well as, But we’re going to do it anyway.

She felt the strings in her head tightening. She could almost hear herself tuning up.

“What do you do down here?” he asked. They worked way downtown, practically in front of the ferry, hidden away from the rest of the city, hidden from everyone else in their lives. No one came this far downtown unless they had to.

“Reporter,” she said. “Writer.” She shoved the bar’s copy of The Herald towards him. He regarded it with amusement. She swallowed some drink. “You?”

“Pyschotherapist,” he said. “But also I’m an analyst. Freudian.” He paused to see if she even knew what that was.

“Oh, God,” she said. She started laughing.

Psychoanalysis was an interest of hers - actually, it was an interest of her boyfriend’s, and she had adopted it as her own. She was working her way through Freud at that very moment – although obviously Jung came before Freud, which she had read first. She was reading Civilization and its Discontents, which was basic, but also foundational. She searched for the best question she could ask, the smartest-sounding.

“So do you think it’s impossible to treat psychotics with analysis, like Freud thought?”

His eyes lit up. “No, not at all,” he said.

“You know, you look young for a psychoanalyst,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said, flattered. “But sometimes I feel myself getting older.”

“What, like you think the music is too loud in bars?”

He laughed. “No, not that. And not physically. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

He ordered her another drink.

They talked and drank, finished each other’s sentences. Looking back, she could hardly remember what they had even talked about.

Did she have a boyfriend, he asked. Of course he already knew. She did, in fact, have a boyfriend, and had  one for the past six years. She was thirty-one, and they had not been intimate in nearly three years, for reasons she nor her boyfriend did not talk about, or really even know.

She noticed that Denis wore no ring. Then she saw the clock behind the bar.

“Oh!” she said. “It’s fucking eight? We’ve been here four hours?”

“We’ve been talking,” he said, taking her hand.

“You don’t understand! I just - I just forgot to go back to work!” She began frantically scrolling through her iPhone. What if major news had broken? What if a bridge had collapsed? What if a celebrity had died?

He shrugged. “They didn’t call you, right?”

“No, but….” She discerned nothing of immediate importance from her emails; there were no texts. “I guess I’m safe. Wow. That was really… that’s never happened before.”

Later, he told her it all came down to her laugh: genuine and silly, not the kind that descended into bitterness or sarcasm by the end.

“Do you want to get out of here,” he said, and they stood up. He was only about an inch taller than her. They went through that thing where each offered to put the other’s barstool away, and then they gave up. There was a moment of awkwardness, and then they kissed for long enough that she saw out of the corner of her eye the bartender shooting her a look.

He suddenly pulled away. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“I have a son,” Denis declared. “He’s home with a babysitter. His name is Peter. I’d… I’d love for you to meet him someday.”

“Oh… wow,” Alice said, recalibrating the situation. She actually disliked children, but suddenly this didn't matter. It was actually kind of great, wasn’t it? She felt she should convey enthusiasm. “I bet you’re a really great dad.”

He practically beamed. "I think I am, actually.”

Her boyfriend sometimes talked about wanting kids, and she said she didn’t want them – she doubted she ever would – and this had become a point of contention.

“So how old is your, um, child?” she asked.

“He’s six.”

So, her place.

*          *          *

Once they got to her apartment - fourth-floor walkup, roommate, rent paid in cash - Denis sat down in one antique chair in her bedroom and crossed his legs, almost like he was preparing to talk to a patient. He looked around her twelve by fourteen warren intently.

The space was not prepared for a visitor; it was cluttered with books, drafts of writing, newspapers, clothes, makeup. He got up and stood before her vanity table, an explosion of feminine ephemera - rings and earrings in tiny receptacles, cosmetics, perfume bottles, necklaces hanging on the wall.

“Is this all yours?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And you use it all...?”

“Yes, of course.”

He stayed in that spot, transfixed.

She went to the bathroom, and when she came back, he was lying on her bed, playing with the buttons on his shirt. She ran her hand through his hair.

“I started going grey when I was eighteen,” he said.

She got up to turn off the light; he said to leave it on. She didn’t want to but she wasn’t going to argue with Denis, and whatever imperfections she wanted to hide with darkness, he didn’t seem like he cared about any of them. She took her hair tie out.

Somewhere in the middle of the act, he blurted, “I love you.” She looked down at him, and thought maybe she had imagined it or that he’d thought she was someone else, but then he said it again. She didn’t react; she filed it away.

Eventually he came, collapsing onto her pillow, hand held over his chest. “Coming is depressing,” he said.

“Every animal after intercourse is sad,” she said. He turned his head and looked at her. She could tell he’d gotten the sentiment if not the reference. So he wasn’t a fan of beat poetry. So he had a child.

Denis started panicking, hand still over his chest, monitoring his heartbeat.

“My heart beats too fast,” he said. “I think if I'm going to go, it's going to be my heart.”

“I’m bipolar,” she said.

Now he was looking at her quizzically. “Why did you want to tell me that?” he asked.

“Now you sound like a shrink,” she said, embarrassed. “Because of what you do, I guess? I just thought… you might understand?”

“Hmm,” he said. “You know, my mother was bipolar,” he said. “If I’m honest with myself, I am too. My mom died when I was nine, you know. I mentioned that to you at the bar.”

He had. It was a car accident, on a lonely stretch of Iowa road late at night. She was coming home from the bar with a family friend named Jaws and Jaws’ wife. Jaws was fine; his wife debilitated for life, his mother killed on impact.

“I just remember my oldest brother taking me on his knee and saying, “Mom’s dead,” he said, sitting up now, leaning against her wall, still naked. “My God, she was a beautiful, striking woman - and in and out of institutions all my life. I remember one time I saw her after a round of – you know – and her just staring – not at me, but through me. She didn’t know who I was.”

Fourteen years later, he’d be in a devastating car accident, one that shattered his elbow – and rerailed a promising Minor Leagues career.

Alice lay next to him silently. She knew she was being entrusted with something. He looked at his watch; it was 2 a.m.

“Oh God,” he said. “I’ve got to get home. The babysitter...”

He dressed, slowly, while she called the car service.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, standing in her doorway.

“Good,” she said. “You?”

“Fragile,” he said. “Well. Let’s see each other again, OK?”

*          *          *

Over the next few days she established a fantasy. Here it was: she broke up with her boyfriend and she moved in with Denis in Cobble Hill (a neighborhood she didn’t even like) and learned to gracefully deal with the child. But it wasn’t just a fantasy; it was real; she was capable of it. She would tear apart her entire life in three weeks, if he let her.

*          *          *

The second time they met, at the whiskey bar inside Fraunces Tavern, she felt right away that something was off. There was a stiffness in his body when she went to kiss him on the cheek. They stuttered through formalities for ten minutes. This wasn’t meant to be a date, she realized, but an information session, a confession. They sat down across from each other in overstuffed leather loveseats. She felt like they were doctor and patient again.

 “I have an ex-wife,” he said. “Who I share custody of Peter with. We were separated for a year, but we never really got around to getting divorced.”

“So you’re…separated?”

“Well. We recently moved back in together.” He laughed. “Three months ago, actually. I wish I’d met you sooner.”

She heard doors slamming shut, locks thrown.

“So you’re… married then,” she said.

He nodded.

"You're not wearing a ring."

"I never wear one."

“Why not?”

He shrugged.

“Do you have a dog, too?” This was meant to be sarcasm, but he didn’t pick up on it.

“Actually, yes! A Jack Russell terrier. Her name is Lola. Short for Lolita. I named her.”

She put her head in her hands.

“You told me you loved me.”

“I did feel that,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I do... have those feelings.”

They looked at each other for a while.

“There was one other woman a few years ago,” he said. “Her name was - I don’t want to say.” He smiled at her name, at the memory. “It lasted two years. I keep in touch with her still, actually. I think she’s with someone now.”

“Why didn’t it work out?” She caught herself, answered her own question. “It’s not supposed to work out, is it?”

Denis began dutifully reciting the most salient details about his wife, though she hadn’t asked. He sat there giving out facts and numbers as if he thought it was the right thing to do, and maybe it was. “She’s older than I am,” he said. “By four years. She’s 49.”

“Christ,” Alice said, who was 31.

“She works in entertainment,” he continued, ignoring the comment. “She’s actually done quite well for herself. She’s British… Anyway, we’ve been married for seven years. We were together for seven years before that. And we don’t… sleep together anymore, either. Since Peter.”

“Where did you meet?”

“Some bar on Bedford Avenue.”

She sighed.

She put her face in her hands again. Then she put her head on her knees. When she finally came up, he looked concerned.

“I just had this stupid fantasy all week,” she whispered, her eyes wet.  "That I could be your girlfriend.”

Denis looked at her with sympathy, but also curiosity: he wanted to see what she would do next.

“What are you doing on Monday?” she asked.

*          *          *

He had a habit of pursing his bee-strung lips when he was listening, and then his brow would furrow, his hooded eyelids would droop. Not like he was falling asleep, just drowsy.

“Every girl loves me for my lips,” he said, and she felt silly that she thought she was the first to notice.

He talked all the time. But it was OK, she thought, because he was smarter, older, more interesting. Even though she knew about several times more about him than he did about her. He would talk and talk, and she would listen, occasionally asking questions, gently prodding, pushing in a different direction. He practically let her analyze him. Why? Was he tired of playing that role with everyone else? Or did he even know she was there?

She asked him what he wanted at the end of the day, as an analyst, from a woman - his wife, her, whoever.

“What do I want in a woman after a day of listening to people talk?” he asked. He paused. “Tactility.”

             “Hmmm,” she said. She didn’t want to say too much.

*          *          *

She told only one person.

Dr. Muller, at first, was offended by Denis’s professional methodology of Freudian psychoanalysis, proclaiming it worthless.

“I don’t like that he’s filling your head with Freud,” he said. “I completely disagree with his method of practice.”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything bad about Freud. He might hear you.”

“It’s bullshit,” Dr. Muller continued. “At least I fucking talk to you during our sessions. Anyway, I think you shouldn't see this guy anymore. He's very, very confused. What do you do together? Drink?”

“We do drink a lot,” she admitted. “But where else can we go in public except bars? Then we have sex and talk about like, the death instinct.”

(“The death instinct isn’t what you think it is,” she could hear Denis saying, lying naked in bed. “It’s not about death or wanting to die. It’s about life, actually. Yes, I know you read ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ but you should read “The Eros and the Id.” That’s what you should read.”)

“Wonderful,” Dr. Muller muttered when she told him this. He fell into thought, then made one last attempt to set her straight.

“Just you wait,” he said. “You know what, maybe you will get him in the end - you’ll regret it.”

Fuck it. Soon, Dr. Muller would be gone for a month on summer vacation, and she wouldn't have to report any more of this to him.

*          *          *

August was the month when the shrinks were away. It had been universally decided (by someone), in New York City at least, that they all took their vacations then.

Denis wouldn’t be seeing patients again until September 12th. For Alice, August was also wide-open, as just a few days before she had been laid off from her job, along with a host of others.

The day the axe fell she texted Denis. She found out about the layoffs – and then her specific layoff – through Twitter, which seemed unnecessarily public. She wasn’t sure if it was too early in the relationship to lay this on him, but they’d slept together the night before, so she figured it was fair. She texted him that she was at the White Horse, spending her severance, and he said he’d be there in an hour.

There wasn’t much to say about work, so they didn’t. He asked if she wanted to see a photo of his son on his cell phone. She said yes. He’d never shown her a photo of him before.

A cute, slightly chubby brown-haired boy, big for his age, appeared. Denis kept saying how much like himself the kid looked, but she couldn’t see it.

Anyway, what she was really interested in was math - if his wife was 49 and her child was six, then how the hell –

“Yeah, we did IVF for three years,” Denis said, looking both somber and pained. “I spent a fortune. And somehow she got pregnant. He’s our miracle baby.”

She thought about how profoundly unsexy the procedure was.. Was everyone a narcissist who needed to have their own flesh and blood, their spitting image ? she thought. Must they?

“I didn’t want a kid at first,” he said. “I was like, no, we should not be doing this. But she was right.”

“What does it feel like to be a dad?” she asked him.

“It feels ... out of control. Complete chaos.”

“That's what it feels like?

“Yes.

“But some people seem to really love raising kids.”

“I don't know,” he said.

“But you light up when you talk about him,” she said.

He shook his head. "The enormity of it... the complete responsibility.”

His eyes spilled over, and he reached for a cocktail napkin. He wiped his eyes, dabbed his nose. "I don't know if I can take it," he said. “You have no control, over anything.”

Denis teared up often. She didn’t know whether he was just always tipsy, exceptionally in touch with his emotions after eight years of getting psychoanalyzed himself, or if it was the bipolar thing.

They went to two or four more bars. They put money in the jukebox, talked about death, made out. He talked about the time he lived in Greece, about the “whores” and also the “regular women” he slept with there.

“Do you have sex with regular women differently than with whores?” she asked.

“What a ridiculous question,” he said. It wasn’t an answer.

At The Woods in Williamsburg, they went into a single occupancy bathroom but he was too wasted and she was in some sort of medication-and-alcohol blackout. They went back to her place and consummated the act. He left at 4am. She felt that things were getting out of control, or beginning to get there. She knew he was getting in trouble with his wife regularly now, coming home at 4:30 several days a week, but figured he could handle that himself.

*          *          *

And so a pattern began: two, maybe three, days a week, when she should have been working on finding a new job, she instead took the same commute back to her old workplace. Met Denis around 4:30 at the Whitehorse, or maybe somewhere fancier, like Bobby Van’s steakhouse, where they were tonight. They’d already run into one of her former colleagues at the bar, one she used to have a crush on, and she was satisfied to have him see her with a well-dressed older man, seeing a brief flicker of confusion in his eye before he pulled himself together and said “Nice to meet you, Denis. You in the business?”

No, Denis said, without explanation. He stared at the opposite wall.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” the former colleague to her. “They got rid of so many people. Bad for morale. And raising the price of the paper to $1.25? Huge mistake. What Bay Ridge grandma wants to fish around her pocket for the extra 25 cents? What are you going to do next?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Denis put an arm around her waist. She smiled at him.

“Well,” said the old coworker. “I’ll excuse myself.”

Denis started out with a vodka martini, and she ordered a Cabernet, since they’d already been out late drinking the night before. They used to see each other once a week or so, and now it had gotten to two, three nights. “Meet me?” his texts would read, usually around 10 a.m., just after she woke up.

That morning, Denis told her, his wife asked him in the bathroom if he was shagging someone.

Alice rolled her eyes. “What did you say?”

“I was like, ‘Are you serious? You know I’m too old for that.’”

She stared at him. His tone and delivery was so pitch-perfect that she almost believed him.

“The thing is, she knows how sexual I am,” he continued, frustrated. “We haven’t had sex in… God.”

His eyes became teary, his nose runny, and he was off, somewhere where she couldn’t reach him.

“I never got love from my mother,” he said, his head dropping towards the bar. “My mother never loved me. And then she died, and I never got to know her.”

“That’s not true,” Alice said, wiping the tears from his cheeks with a cocktail napkin. She wondered if his wife dealt with these episodes better, or just differently. “Every mother loves their child. It’s just that your mom was sick, that’s all.”

He shook his head, stared into the distance. A few minutes later and the mood had passed.

“I love life,” he announced, his eyes glassy. “My mother didn’t. But I do.” She got the feeling he wasn’t aware of her presence anymore.

“I love life!” he declared, untucking his shirt from his pants, then unbuttoning it, taking it off, raising his arms over his head in victory. His chest was deeply tanned from a recent family trip to St-Maartens.

She laughed. She knew she shouldn’t encourage him, but she couldn’t stop laughing. Two minutes later a beefy man in a dark suit came over and said, “I’m sorry sir, you’re going to have to put your shirt back on. It’s not that I don’t like your body, man. But you’re going to have to close it up.”

The man stood there and waited. Denis put his shirt half back on and then did nothing. Finally, Alice got up, went to the other side of the table, and buttoned his shirt.

They resumed their usual routine, with the usual script, at next bar. First they ordered a round. Denis kissed her and asked, “Do you love me?”

“Yes,” she said, and she meant it.

“Tell me.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

They had known each other four weeks then, maybe five.

The bill came to $156.74 and did not include any food.

*          *          *

The next time she saw Denis, she reminded him of what he did at the steakhouse.

“Wait, what did I do?” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t remember.”

She’d been getting the feeling that he didn’t remember lots of things about their time together. She also realized she was wrong about his wife: Fiona was not, as she had jealously imagined, a dull and child-obsessed British harpie, but a saint. How she put up with him was beyond even her comprehension.

“What does Fiona say about your drinking?” she asked, delicately. Like she was one to talk.

“Oh, she hates it. She tells me, You’re an alcoholic. You need help,” Denis said. “She says, Which of our friends would put up with you? Denise wouldn’t, Patricia wouldn’t, Maria wouldn’t…”

Alice sipped her whiskey, calmly, but with dread. The first crack had appeared. Oh, there were other, smaller cracks, like the way he went on and on about his son. It was so boring: Children are not a miracle, she wanted to tell him. Of course you love your son; you’re supposed to, she wanted to say. And sometimes, a smaller, crueler thought occasionally came through after an excess of whiskey: If you love him so much, why aren’t you with him right now?

She also thought, but didn’t say: And how do you help anybody?

“I wonder if she’s going to leave me,” he was saying, grimly. Had he forgotten that he’d left her? For an entire year, for another woman, for someone even younger than Alice?

But mostly she didn’t think about his wife, or his kid, or her boyfriend. She and Denis were beautifully selfish; they thought only about themselves, about what they wanted and needed at that very moment, because their time together was short but wonderful. Food? Well, neither of them really ate much - they were running a little manic. Drinks? Sex? A taxi? Yes, that was all they needed, plus good songs on the juke. What else was there? Nothing. They glided through the city, frictionless. Bartenders, waiters looked at them twice, of course, because of the age difference. But that was part of the fun. Of course, they might appear to be a cliche, but they knew, they held the deepest conviction, that they were different. Smarter, better in bed, able to hold their liquor. And they wouldn’t get caught. They were too good for that. No one would ever be negatively affected by what they were doing, and what they were doing would never come to an end.

Sex wasn’t just sex, Alice whispered urgently, holding his hands across a table, and he nodded in assent. It was a human right, she said. A political act.

Speaking of, Denis said. Maria was going to England in two weeks and taking Peter with her. Shouldn’t they go away somewhere?

“What do you want?” he asked. “The beach, upstate, the Hamptons?”

“Maybe the Hamptons,” she said, casually. She’d actually never been. “Only if we rent a room and never come out,” she added in a whisper. How could she sneak away for three days? What excuse could she make? She could probably get away with it. The way things had been going, with their invincibility, she knew she would.

*          *          *

They never made it to the Hamptons. Denis spent that interlude alone, maybe just to prove to himself that he could say no to temptation. After a week, he called her.

“Alice, this is crazy,” he said, using a tone of adult reason. His therapist voice.

“What?” she whimpered. “But what about – “

“You must have known we couldn’t go on like we have been. Plus, I’ve been drinking more and more, and I don’t even know what to do about it - ”

He’d crashed. He’d crashed before she had.

“I have a wife and child, Alice.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “You picked me up.”

“I was reckless.” Clinical, detached.

“We don’t have to stop seeing each other,” she whimpered. “We could just… cut down. Or… or… what about the French? They all have affairs and it’s just, it’s just accepted…”

“Alice, it’s not as easy as being like the French. I have a wife and child – “

“Oh, shut up!”

He sighed. “Listen,” he said. “Going forward - “

“Going forward!” she shrieked. “Who talks like that?”

“What’s wrong with saying ‘going forward’?”

They hung up and she sobbed in a way she hadn’t in a long time, in years maybe. It was hard to tell. Any amount of crying was impressive for her. The meds made it hard to cry.

*          *          *

The breakup - whatever you’d call it – was easier for him, she was sure. She knew this from the second time they met. It was something he said after the first night they’d been together.

He hadn’t taken a shower when he’d gotten home, he’d told her. “Almost like I wanted to be caught, getting into bed with the smell of another woman on me,” he said. “But I didn’t, of course.” Get caught.

The next day, he told her, he went to Asbury Park with his son and his wife that he never got around to divorcing, in his words, and waded into the water.

"I went in about chest-deep,” he said, “and I felt you washing off me."

For him, it was that easy. What he had been telling her, nearly from the start, was that he got away with everything.