——— Well, how would I know actually? I mean, I can only extrapolate generalities from my experience with you. You know, move from the specific to the general, the universal where we are as one with each other in our ability to defy wisdom and keep doing the same ridiculous things that make us come here…. Come here to get particularly out of our universal sufferings.

——— Are you suffering today?

——— Not significantly. I’d say not to any great extent. I’m pullin’ my own heart strings, I guess you can say that. I’m tuggin’ my own heart strings. “Brokenhearted melody. Sing a song of love….”

——— The last words are “Sing a song of love to me.”

——— Oh really, is that what you’d like me to do, huh? Sing to you, croon a lyric of romance and passion?

——— If that’s what you’d like to do.

——— But I can’t do that. You’re my analyst. How would it look for me to seduce my analyst. Then I’d be a real sickie, a raging nymphomaniac for real. I really need to do that. Get worse, so I can get better.

——— What might seem like, feel like, getting worse, whatever that is, may actually be a sign of getting better.

——— Right.

——— No, I mean it. The more easily you move through feelings or memories that you find terribly disturbing, the less dangerous these feelings are to you, the less likely you are to…

——— Awright. I feel like sucking your toes.

——— Hum. I don’t think anyone has ever wanted to do that before.

——— Oh, come on. You’re sort of cute, sometimes. I mean, some woman sometime must have wanted to suck your toes. You can’t be that deprived.

——— What do you think?

——— What do you mean? “What do you think?” I told you what I think. It’s impossible that somebody, man or woman, I don’t mean to be presumptuous about your preference, but I know somebody must have sucked your toes, somebody must’ve.

———

——— Well, aren’t you going to defend yourself?

——— I didn’t know I was under attack.

——— Jesus, here I am offering my highly refined sensual skills and you think you’re under attack. God, men are weird.

——— I didn’t reject your lovely proposition in any way, Liliane. You introduced the sparring here.

——— Well, I don’t want to talk about this anyway.

——— Okay.

——— Well, don’t you see this is dangerous? What I said to you is dangerous.

——— No. How is that?

——— You know, sometimes, I think, you should pay me money. Shrinks and analysts, therapists, counselors, all you guys, can’t let your patients, your clients, get personally involved. It’s unethical.

——— Yes, unethical as well as criminal.

——— But who’d believe a woman who was seeing a shrink in the first place who said her shrink attack—seduced her. That’s nuts in the get-go.