A Curable Romantic Read Online Free Page A

continual social embarrassment for me. Invited to dinner by my aunt Fania and uncle Moritz, for example, I arrived never less than punctually, which was always too early. Caught out like actors behind a curtain that has risen before its cue, Fania and Moritz made off-seeming conversation while seeing to the last of their preparations.
    Naturally, I had no wish to repeat this error at the Freuds’, certainly not on the evening I was to meet the Fräulein, and so when the great stone wheel of the week finally turned and Saturday finally dropped into place, I sat at the window, self-imprisoned in my armchair, waiting for the sky to fully darken. Then I dallied as I’d never dallied before. I dallied in choosing my clothing, in dressing, in bolting the door. I set the hands of my watch back ten minutes and then, intentionally forgetting I’d done so, I did so again. Descending the stairs to the street, I set out as tentatively as a blind man without his switch and crossed the city, stopping continually to ascertain whether I’d remembered my wallet. Halfway there, I began to run, fearing I was late. Arriving at Dr. Freud’slanding, I stood frozen, listening to the sounds of my own breathing, until my self-consciousness grew too acute and I forced myself to ring the bell.
    As I did, carillons bellowed eight chimes from a nearby church tower. In the half-light of the landing, I clicked open my watch. Factoring in the twenty minutes or so I’d set the timepiece back, I saw that it was precisely eight o’clock.
    “Oh, but you’re early,” the maid said as she opened the door. She pointed to a bench stationed against the wall. “Sit in the foyer, and I’ll interrupt Dr. Freud’s meal with his family to inform him that you’re here.”
    “I could come back later, if that would be more convenient,” I said.
    She pirouetted on the toe of her shoe. “Tell me, sir, what would be more convenient about receiving you twice.”
    I pointed to the wooden bench. “I’ll just wait here then.”
    “As you wish.” Curtsying, she abandoned me to the foyer.
    My spectacles had fogged, and I’d taken them off to polish, and when Dr. Freud appeared before me, it was as a column of white-and-brown splotches. “Oh, no! She didn’t leave you sitting out here by yourself, did she? You’re not the bootblack, after all.”
    “There was a chair,” I said.
    “A bench,” he said. “It’s hardly a chair.”
    A large white napkin was pinned around his neck, and he seemed to be chewing the last of his meal. Turning from me, he gripped the knobs of the twin doors behind him and rolled them into their wings. He beckoned me into a sitting room and gestured me towards a red Turkish divan. “You’ll be more comfortable in here, I should think.” With a yank, he unpinned the napkin and spat something into it. Gristle, I thought. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m running late and must prepare for the others. I don’t know what could be keeping them.” Glancing at his watch, he bowed and retreated from the room.
    I sighed and stood and looked out the window at the stand of snow-burdened trees that rose up behind the apartment’s stables. What had I gotten myself into? I had no idea. Although it was nearly 1895 and although Sigmund Freud was, of course, Sigmund Freud, the truth wasthat no one yet knew it, perhaps least of all Sigmund Freud. Though he’d crafted a dozen or so monographs on various aspects of neurology, his foundational work on neurosis, on the dream, on the unconscious, lay very much ahead of him. Even Studies on Hysteria , the book he’d authored with Dr. Breuer and whose five case histories would soon become the creation myths of our new century, was months from publication.
    As far as I knew, as far as anyone knew, Dr. S. Freud was a struggling neuropath, a nerve specialist, shocking his clientele — the hysterical daughters of Jewish Vienna — not with irrefutable evidence of their unconscious sexual crimes