Free Butterfly by Kathryn Harvey Page A

she whispered. “Please. Hurry!”
    She thought she saw a flicker of perplexity in the masked eyes. Then suddenly his
    body changed. He moved fast now, rapidly. He closed his eyes. He concentrated.
    “Yes!” she said hoarsely. “Yes!”
    Finally he shuddered and groaned and pulled her so hard against him that, for a
    moment, Linda couldn’t breathe.
    “Did you have an orgasm?” the analyst asked as Linda paced the carpet.
    “You know I didn’t. Damn.” She stopped and looked at Dr. Virginia Raymond, who
    was sitting in a wicker chair, silhouetted against the breathtaking backdrop of Los
    Angeles. “It’s the same every time,” Linda went on. “The love-making is fantastic. But I
    hold myself back. I can’t help it. No matter what he does, how exciting it feels to me, I
    don’t respond internally. I go through the motions. I talk, I move, I tell him what I want.
    And then…nothing. And when it’s over I feel the resentment come back.”
    “Resentment toward whom or what?” asked Dr. Raymond.
    Linda smiled at the psychiatrist. “I don’t really know. Maybe the doctors that per-
    formed so many operations on me when I was little. Or the pot of scalding water that
    caused the trauma. My mother maybe. All the men who won’t stay with me long enough
    to help me cure my frigidity. The world, I suppose.” She stopped at the floor-to-ceiling
    window and looked out. It was January, a breathtaking day in Southern California. The
    ocean, pearly and blue, stood in the distance, with bright green palm trees and frothy
    clouds to complete a perfect picture. On the street down below there was an enormous
    billboard. It displayed the familiar face of the man who had founded the Moral Decency
    movement. Linda had seen his Good News Hour a few times. There was no doubt about
    it, the Reverend was a charismatic speaker. She wouldn’t have believed that a
    Fundamentalist Christian could gain such a wide following. The popularity polls showed
    that the Reverend had a good chance of winning the Republican nomination at the con-
    vention in June.
    She turned away from the window and went to a wicker sofa, where she settled down
    into tangerine cushions. Dr. Raymond’s office was peaceful, a gardenlike haven in the
    middle of hectic Century City. Linda had been coming here for almost ten years.
    “I want so badly to share my life with someone,” Linda said quietly. “I don’t like living
    alone. I would like a husband and children. I tried so hard to make those two marriages
    work, you know. I really tried.”
    Dr. Raymond nodded. Dr. Linda Markus had started coming to her when her first
    marriage was failing. Linda’s husband had claimed not to have been able to tolerate her
    late hours at the hospital, or being called away on emergencies. “He says that just once
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    Kathryn Harvey
    he’d like to see a movie all the way through!” Linda had said back then. But both she and
    Dr. Raymond knew the real reason for his wanting the divorce. It had nothing to do with
    doctor’s hours. The reason was Linda’s frigidity.
    And then, four years later, her second husband had echoed those same words, declar-
    ing that he had gotten tired of Linda’s beeper cutting into their social (and sometimes
    love) life. And again, Linda and her analyst knew the real reason for his wanting to get
    away.
    That second marriage had lasted a mere eleven months. Since then, Dr. Raymond had
    heard from Linda about brief encounters, all of them unsuccessful, until finally Linda had
    given up.
    Linda looked at her watch. When she had returned the TV producer’s call and had
    found that Barry Greene’s office was in the same building as her analyst’s, Linda had made
    an appointment with him to precede her regular weekly session with Dr. Raymond.
    “He says he has a job for me,” Linda had said earlier in the hour. “A job! As if I weren’t
    overloaded enough as it was!”
    “But you are going to take it anyway?” Virginia Raymond had