Free Talking in Bed by Antonya Nelson

didn't want to touch them, or their problems. He didn't want to be so constantly steeped in suicidal or homicidal thinking. He was tired of the sameness of their complaints, the fundamentally flawed basis of his relationship with them. He was a make-believe friend, a paid listener, a bottomless pit, a pet, a basically blind confessional. It disturbed him that his clients might feel genuinely absolved; after all, he was praised for
not
judging the scrupulousness of their morals. They were safe with him, like harbored criminals; he did not report their corruption, merely took it from them, gave it shelter and them relief.
    A
real
secret, though, must not be spoken, must never be confessed. Must worm its way around inside a person until it meant something. A person could tolerate more secrecy, he thought. A society could benefit from some repression.
    He tormented himself on this subject for a minute or two, then welcomed Luellen, who always liked to begin her time with anecdotes from her job. She worked in a photo studio as a lowly set designer, which meant she painted props, moved scenery, sometimes posed as a stand-in for what she jeeringly called the talent. She always had a funny story to entertain him with before they launched into the familiar but abiding enigma of her family. Perhaps this was intended to make her feel less like a client and more like a friend, or perhaps it was merely a part of her character her desire to please him, as if there ought to be something in their sessions for him. Ev liked to hear about other people's jobs—and maybe she'd figured that out about him. He liked to pretend, even to himself, that his clients' jobs had something to do with their problems. And sometimes they did. Luellen, for example, had wanted to be a photographer. But she'd ended up as an underling, running errands, taking 'roids, sometimes being in modest ways creative. Luellen would oblige Ev's interest in her work; she was very sane at work, very talented and appreciated, something that cheered Ev. Her personal life, however away from the photo studio, both saddened and repelled him. She slept with a lot of men. She had a kind of death-wish sexuality, picking up strangers, allowing them into her home, then not using condoms. It was a practice she kept trying to quit—"Yes, I remember
Mr. Goodbar,
" she'd told him early on, "that old chestnut"—treating herself to just one picked-up man a week, or occasionally agreeing to go out with the same guy more than once, forcing herself to suffer through the motions of standard dating practices.
    At first Ev thought her father must have molested her, too. Then he thought the man had probably not abused any of the children. Now he believed Luellen: her father had chosen to have sex with her sisters and not to have sex with Luellen. The father always determines the sex, Ev thought idly as he listened to Luellen, from the X and Y chromosomes right on through to adult preferences and perversions. And what constituted a perversion? he asked himself. It was a question he would never successfully answer. Mightn't the human animal instinctively mate with many? Mightn't Luellen's sex drive be perfectly normal, albeit out of keeping with contemporary prudence and paranoia?
    But so much interfered with what was natural or animal. The oversize human brain, for example. The more you could disengage it, the better. Ev himself had never managed to feel comfortable making love in any house where his father slept. It had made his and Rachel's sex life awkward during the months the old man had lived with them, right before dying. Before even considering fucking his wife, Ev had had to tiptoe through his own apartment, an adult man, and listen for the harsh but steady breathing—"Darth Vader," Rachel had nicknamed it—that signified his father's deep sleep. Utterly humiliating. But not unusual, Ev knew. Many of his clients complained of feeling uncomfortable about having sex in the