Free A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell

similarly invigorated other?
The woman who, Wednesday last, during the Mozart at the Lichtentaler Pfarrkirche, caught the eye of the gentleman behind her, enraptured by the obbligati, is hereby begged for a longer interlude at a suitable hour to be agreed upon, he prays, through Box 456, this newspaper, at the convenience of her delight.
    At the convenience of her delight? Is this what Fräulein Eckstein wanted? To declaim her love for me from behind a mask of serifed prose? If so, I suspected it had everything to do with her mother. Indeed, howintoxicating to conduct an illicit affair right beneath the nose of one’s dueña. (Ah! the nose! the nose! I couldn’t get Dr. Fliess’s damned noses out of my brain!) I turned the pages of the paper and glanced through the ads once again. I was shocked to see that even the bite of an agonized conscience was inked in printer’s black for all the world to see:
My darling S., I live in terror over what my sister may or may not suspect. Leave no more letters at our home, nor will I meet you this afternoon in your laboratory. Communicate with me only through Box 621, this newspaper, and may God grant us the strength to stop, your loving M.
    I cinched the belt of my robe tighter. How had I gotten myself into this mess? A day before, I might have been entranced by the naughtiness of it all. Now I only felt intimidated by the game. I was in over my head, and I knew it. True, I’d been ogling women for years, but nothing like this had ever happened to me as a consequence. And the truth of the matter is it had very little to do with me. Coincidence alone had placed Dr. Freud beside me at the Carl; happenstance had allowed him to read my mind — I didn’t even possess courage enough to ask him for the Fräulein’s name — and it was the Fräulein herself who had approached me at the Freuds’ Christmas party. Left to my own devices, I’m certain I’d still be daydreaming about a nameless girl I would never see again. And wouldn’t that be preferable? I had no head for this sort of thing! I could barely navigate the circles of the city. With a map Otto had given me when I’d first moved in, I’d plotted out my essential routes — from my apartment to the hospital, from the hospital to the opera, and lately from the hospital, my apartment, or the opera to Dr. Freud’s. Despite my stalking of him, I had little idea where the rest of the city was kept, including, or rather especially, the offices of the Neue Freie Presse. Nor did I understand how one went about procuring for himself a “numbered box.” Certainly the clerk who handled these transactions understood their licentious purposes. How brazen was the Fräulein, one had to wonder, that she could meet the wink of this fellow while filling out the requisite forms?
    (Glancing through the advertisements, I soon discovered that there were many purposes, not all of them immoral, to which one mightemploy one’s box: professors giving piano lessons advertised for students in this way, as did merchants searching for employees and tradesmen for customers. The libertines and demimondaines who flaunted their epistolary concupiscence in the broad daylight of newsprint did so under the protective banner of these more respectable burghers.)
    It was nearly three in the morning when I threw the paper down. I lay on the sofa, and once again, I saw that hard, mad glint in Dr. Freud’s eye. Looking deeper into it, I was repulsed by the homunculur portrait of myself reflected in its vacuum. Beneath his captious leer, I appeared not as I knew myself — a lovelorn chap searching myopically through the circular maze of Vienna for a woman who might love him with an ardor equaling his own — but as Dr. Freud saw me: a wild, slobbering satyr whose membrum virile, rising like a gnarled branch from the delta of his crotch, had become so inflamed, he’d stick it anywhere to extinguish its fire. My desire for love had somehow transformed me into a