Free In the Drink by Kate Christensen Page B

the fog, then standing erect, then walking with gingerly steps toward the bathroom. Everything looked too small and far away, and my limbs felt relaxed and heavy, uncoordinated, as if I’d grown much taller during the night.
    I stumbled through the bathroom doorway, turned on the shower, made the water as hot as I could stand it, and stood under it. The sight of my breasts reminded me of sex, in particular the fact that I hadn’t had any in a long time. I soaped them; it felt good. I wished someone else were there to do it for me, but I had to take what I could get, which was the recollection of various encounters I’d had with John Threadgill. Wehad parted ways last spring after just two months together, but not before we’d had enough ravenous encounters in the backseats of taxis and dive-bar bathrooms and the vestibules of tenement buildings to provide me with leaping-off points for fantasies whenever I needed them. I switched the water flow to the bathtub faucet, turned it on full blast, and positioned my crotch directly under the plunging jet of water. I imagined that John was having his jovially brutal way with me in a meat-district warehouse loading zone on a winter night. We had drunk enough red wine in the course of the long night to obliterate the frost-cold air and the hard metal edges we kept hitting various parts of ourselves against. We were fully clothed, with only the requisite parts exposed, and we went at each other violently, with gritted teeth, half laughing, our naked warm joined flesh the only thing we were aware of, everything else a febrile blur.
    After this fantasy had run its course I had a brief moment of dislocation, trying to reconcile the water faucet with the large, vivid man I’d just allowed myself to be ravished by. I got out of the tub, toweled off, blew my hair dry, threw on a reasonably clean wool skirt and cardigan to hide the torn seam of my blouse, gulped a cup of coffee, and headed out into the day. The cold bright air tingled on my face; the whiskey seemed to have metabolized during the night into another kind of drug, some bracing combination of caffeine and champagne.
    Then, out of nowhere, a mental time-release mechanism triggered the memory of everything that had happened last night. I stopped in front of an OTB and stared pop-eyed into the paper-strewn, sweaty interior. I met the eyes of a man who was looking out at me, but I was too stricken to know at first what I was seeing. Our gazes held a fraction of a second too long and then he lifted his eyebrows at me. I looked quickly away and staggered down Amsterdam, feeling as if I had irreparablyripped the fragile cloth my life was made of. I wanted to fall to the sidewalk and pound my skull to a pulp against the concrete.
    Then I heard, as I occasionally did, the voice of Ruth Koswicki, my old therapist. “Oh, come now, Claudia,” she said in my mind, “so what if the volcano erupted a little bit? Did you really think all that lava could just stay underground forever?” I could see her round, plain face, her dark eyes trained earnestly on me, hair falling from her bun around her face in gray and black strands, her rounded bosom heaving with the intensity of her empathetic response to me. She wore muumuus and sneakers and seemed to have a permanent cold; she poured cup after cup of chamomile tea from the teapot on the table next to her, sipping at it with rabbity little nipping motions. She had reassured me eight times over the phone when I’d called to set up my first appointment that she wasn’t a Freudian; only then had I consented to see her, and only because I was desperately depressed and had no idea where else to turn. Her most fervent speeches made me itch to burst out laughing; her assurances and reassurances made me squirm with childish skepticism, but I kept going back week after week because somehow I knew that it did me good to chafe under the gooey warmth of her mothering. When I quit the receptionist job