Free Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson Page B

time, there s a complete cure.”
    He reached for the letter and took it from her still-tight fingers. She could not watch him as he began to read it, as if she would spy upon him in his first moments. He said nothing as he read. Long after he must have finished it, he said nothing. She still did not look up. He did not return the two pages to her. He did not crumple them. He did not put them down. He simply remained standing there in silence.
    At last she raised her eyes. She had never seen his face this way, a yellowish white, like wax and iron fused, the muscles standing out as if wiring his jawbones. Not even at the worst of his stroke had he looked so ill, so done for. Her heart went out to him but she could not speak. This was the first moment of his knowing, this his first step into this new pain. He needed time; give him the room he needs. This was his dividing line, separating all of what life was before he knew from all of what life would be from now on.
    He said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, if it’s true.”
    “It may be true. It may change.”
    “If it’s true now, it will stay true.”
    “We can’t know. He’s never done anything. You know Jeff never lies.”
    “I know he doesn’t.” He put the letter down, quite gently, put it into her lap as if it were a bouquet of flowers he was presenting her. Then, slowly, he left the room. She stared at the white pages. From down the hall she could hear him softly close the door to his room. Then there was a new sound, convulsive, drawn-out, and she knew he was crying.
    It was the next day that she canceled a luncheon engagement and went to the public library on Fifth Avenue. She had to learn whatever there was for a layman to learn about homosexuality, learn it fast, learn it for Ken’s sake, her own sake, perhaps for Jeff’s.
    Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis—she could make a start, go through a cram course for a few weeks to give herself some foundation, and then she could narrow down to more modern texts—were there any? She, an editor, did not know. Ten or twelve years ago, of course, there had been the Kinsey report on male sexuality, with its phenomenal success and immediate respect; she had leafed through it, but it had been too technical for her to read carefully. From reviews and discussions she knew that Kinsey’s work showed that homosexuality was no infrequent phenomenon, far from it, but that was about the sum of it. How little one did know about it, how vague and cloudy the whole subject was, even for people who held themselves generally well informed.
    At the card catalogue, she riffled through the K’s, but the memory of Kinsey’s pages of scientific charts and data came at her with an unexpected oppressiveness, and she went instead to the drawer where Sigmund Freud was listed. She found that he had written Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality back in 1905, but the card indicated that the essays dealt with homosexuality, and she made out a slip for the volume, and another for his famous Outline of Psychoanalysis.
    An agitation began to weave through her as she waited for the books to arrive from the stacks. She opened the essays first, and agitation mounted. She began to read but it was as if her eyes could not see accurately; the words stared up at her from the page, little black letters, spaced off in groups, meaning nothing, sentences rippling, gently tossing up and down, like brooks. She persisted, turning pages, seeking, catching an occasional familiarity, oedipal, libido, fixation, castration-anxiety, hypothesis that it is innate … or acquired, pregenital objects. But soon she shut her eyes and leaned back against the solid wood of the chair she sat in.
    She could not go on. It was too soon; she should have known it. This frantic scrabbling for knowledge, this obsessive need to discover, to make herself an expert—there was something ignoble in it, rising not from the love of knowing but from some desperation spawned by fear