(1987) The Celestial Bed Read online

  had been stained deep brown to give it a rich panelled look. Hung from the walls, in cream matted frames, were Freeberg’s impressive panoply of idols: Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Theodore H. van de Velde, Marie Stopes, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

  On the nearby wall there was a decorative mirror and Dr Arnold Freeberg’s eyes came to rest on that and on the reflection of himself. Sheepishly he inspected himself - high comb of wiry black hair, somewhat stiff and unruly, thick horn-rimmed spectacles over small myopic eyes, hooked nose, full dark moustache and short beard encircling his fat lips. Fleetingly, closed in by his predecessors, he felt embarrassed. He didn’t measure up to them. Not yet, not yet. But one day soon, perhaps. He believed and he would try.

  His eyes moved to the silver-framed photograph on a corner of his desk. His wife, Miriam, attractive in her mid-thirties, and their smiling son, Jonny, a delight. Freeberg became conscious of his own years, his late fortyishness, late to have a first child, but not really, not actually.

  Giving his head a shake, he drew his notes closer and tried to concentrate on them. Quickly, he skimmed them, then pushed them aside. He knew them all by heart and would not need them for reference when he spoke to his new surrogates.

  He still had fifteen minutes to spare before his five surrogates appeared, and almost as a relaxation he began to review the events of the last four months that had brought him to these moments. He relived those four months in the present.

  Within two weeks of Freeberg’s initial phone call from Tucson to Roger Kile in Los Angeles, Kile had finished his investigations and found the location. Not in Los Angeles proper, as it turned out. Los Angeles was too heavily populated with sex therapists, Kile had learned, and furthermore centrally situated properties were overpriced. But following expert advice - Kile had always been a clever investigator, even in law school at Columbia, and although a tax attorney, his knowledge and interests were widespread — he had found the community in which his friend might prosper an hour north of Los Angeles.

  The community proved to be Hillsdale, California, a burgeoning incorporated city on the coast highway and close to the rolling blue Pacific Ocean. It was a sprawling city of 360,000. There were

  plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists there, but not one sex therapist yet. Roger Kile had been assured, by knowledgeable contacts, that a practice would flourish for any reputable sex therapist who set up shop in Hillsdale with a team of trained and professional sex surrogates. Hillsdale, Kile learned from medical contacts, had more than a fair share of disturbed, troubled, and sexually dysfunctional persons.

  After that, Kile found two well-recommended real estate agents, and they quickly led him to four small office buildings that appeared to be possibilities. Freeberg spotted the perfect building immediately, a vacant two-storey construction abandoned by a clothing store chain, and set in the middle of Market Avenue, three blocks off bustling Main Street. After that, everything fell into place rapidly. Freeberg hired an excellent young architect to remodel the vacant building along the lines of his Tucson clinic. Then Freeberg flew back to Tucson with his wife, to divest himself of the old clinic. Meanwhile, Miriam got rid of their ranch-style house, breaking even.

  They went to Hillsdale four times in the period that followed. While Freeberg stood by to oversee the remodelling of his clinic, Miriam sought a new house and found a wonderful eight-room one-storey residence about three miles from her husband’s offices.

  Immediately, Freeberg began to install the necessary personnel in his clinic. Through an MD nearby, Dr Stan Lopez, a general practitioner that Freeberg had come to respect, Freeberg was able to obtain Suzy Edwards as his personal secretary. Lopez had been using Suzy as a part-time second secretary and knew that she wanted a full-time job. Freeberg interviewed Suzy, a solemn and interested redhead of around thirty. She was eager for the job, and Freeberg had already heard that she was trustworthy. After that he hired Norah Ames as his practical nurse, and Tess Wilbur as his receptionist.

  Next, Freeberg sent personal letters to every medical person around the country that he had met at conventions and seminars, announcing the opening of the Freeberg Clinic in Hillsdale, California, and offering intensive treatment and the use of female and male sex surrogates when they were found necessary. While awaiting responses, Freeberg instigated his search for sex surrogate candidates. To obtain applicants, Freeberg wrote personal letters to psychoanalysts in Hillsdale, and to fellow therapists in Los

  Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Within a few short weeks he received twenty-three applications from those wishing to become sex surrogates, and even as the replies came in, Freeberg received referrals of patients who were in desperate need of his kind of therapy. From these referrals, Freeberg knew that he would require five surrogates, four women and one man, plus the services of Gayle Miller, who would shortly be leaving Tucson for Hillsdale.

  As the surrogate candidates gradually arrived, Freeberg began to screen them, interviewing each personally. Many were short interviews, because the candidates did not qualify. If a candidate gave, for her motivation, that she thought this would be interesting work, she was disqualified. Interesting work was not good enough, not motivation enough. If any candidate showed the slightest concern about being a candidate, or any hesitancy whatsoever, she was eliminated.

  The longer interviews were given over to women who were well motivated. There were divorced women with no children living at home, who’d had sexually inadequate husbands. There were women who’d had problems with lovers suffering sexual dysfunctions. There were women who’d seen sexual troubles in their parents, siblings, other relatives. All the candidates, no matter what their previous callings, were bound by a common desire to assist sexually crippled men in becoming fully normal males.

  Always in his interviews, Freeberg kept in mind something that a colleague had once remarked: ‘A good surrogate is sensitive, compassionate, and emotionally mature.’ A qualified surrogate was someone who was also comfortable with her own body and her own sexuality. Every female that Freeberg seriously considered, if she was presently unmarried, had to have had a normal sexual relationship, had to know that she was sexually responsive, and had to have confidence in her own femininity. Above all else, she had to burn with the desire to repair the sexually wounded among the male population.

  In the end, Freeberg wound up with four highly promising female sex surrogate candidates - Lila Van Patten, Elaine Oakes, Beth Brant and Janet Schneider. Once trained, they would make a perfect group to team up with his soon-to-arrive Gayle Miller.

  Freeberg had required only one male sex surrogate. Male

  surrogates to work with dysfunctional female patients were not in demand. Freeberg had discovered that a male surrogate did not fit the value system of most females. It was the old nonsense, lingering into the 1980s: if a male had numerous women, he was OK, a cocksman; if a female had casual sex with many men, she had round heels and was a fool. Generally, having sex with a stranger, in this case a male surrogate, was unthinkable by American social standards. Usually women - far more than men -needed time to build toward a satisfying relationship. But this was California, times were changing, a little, just a little. Freeberg could see that there would be a female patient now and then, and so he would need at least one male sex surrogate. In Freeberg’s screenings, a single applicant had stood out. He was a young man from Oregon, experienced, interested in his personal growth, thoughtful, warm, and with a real desire to help troubled and suffering women patients become normal. His name was Paul Brandon. Among the handful of male candidates, Brandon was the one that Freeberg selected for training.

  The door to his office had opened, and Freeberg came out of his reverie. ‘They’re here, Dr Freeberg,’ his redheaded personal secretary, Suzy Edwards, was saying. ‘The surrogates you selected, they’re seated in the all-purpose room waiting for you.’

  Freeberg smiled and hea
ved his stocky body to his feet. ‘Thanks, Suzy. Time for the curtain to go up.’

  Dr Arnold Freeberg shut down the piped-in music, left his office, and walked briskly to the far end of the all-purpose room - a thirty-foot room that resembled a sparsely furnished living room. Here and there, on the floor, lay mattresses, and at the far end was a sofa facing the five surrogates, ranging in age from twenty-eight to forty-two. They were seated on folding chairs in a semicircle.

  With a smile, Freeberg nodded to them, was pleased to see they were all neatly dressed and alert. He knew that they were comfortable - his nurse Norah had already introduced them to each other - but on their faces were expectant expressions.

  Freeberg sat down on the sofa, settled back, crossed one leg over the other.

  ‘Janet Schneider,’ he said as if reading a roll call, ‘Paul Brandon, Lila Van Patten, Beth Brant, Elaine Oakes - I’m so pleased to have

  you here. Welcome to the Freeberg Clinic. I am delighted to tell you that you are all, without exception, decidedly qualified, highly qualified, to become valuable and useful partner surrogates.’

  He observed their immediate and unanimous pleasure at the compliment.

  ‘I am going to speak to you today about your training programme, which will begin in this room tomorrow at nine o’clock in the morning. Your training will be entirely under my supervision, five days a week, for six weeks. Only in the final Kages will I bring in outsiders. When we get to penile-vaginal contact, I will require the assistance of four males and one female recommended by the International Professional Surrogates Association in Los Angeles. These will be former patients - or clients, as some call them today — who once suffered their own sexual problems, have gone through full courses of exercises with reputable therapists and experienced surrogates, and have been pronounced cured and ready to deal with their own intimate lives.

  ‘At this time I am going to brief you on the training period that lies ahead of you, so that you know what to expect. This will be a monologue. I will speak without pause. If you have questions, save them for when I have finished. Also, of course, I will shorthand the whole procedure, so to speak - just give you the highlights, since all of it will develop fully in your training period. Further, do not be concerned about any questions you failed to ask me today. You can ask them as we work from tomorrow on.

  ‘Oh, yes - ’

  He focused on Paul Brandon.

  ‘ — Mr Brandon, since most of the patients we’ll be dealing with in therapy will be males, I will address myself to the activities of our female surrogates who will work with them. However, almost all the procedures I discuss will apply to you, too, as a male surrogate working with female patients. Where there are exceptions in your treatments, well, we can take these up privately later when you are assigned to female patients seeking help.’

  Digging into his pocket for his box of cigarillos, Freeberg said, ‘I have no objections to any of you smoking, if those around you do not mind, or even chewing gum or mints.’ Lighting his cigarillo, he saw Brandon pull an old briar pipe and pouch from his jacket pocket, while Lila Van Patten removed a packet of cigarettes from her bag.

  ‘Let’s begin with the basics,’ Freeberg continued. ‘Why were you selected to serve as partner, or sex surrogates? I selected you not because of your good looks, or physiques, or what I deemed to be your sex appeal. I selected you for more important overall qualities — because I saw in each of you the qualities of knowledge, compassion, warmth, and real concern for others not as healthy as yourselves. You all have in common an appreciation of giving, receiving, touching, and caring, and a desire to share what you have to offer.

  ‘Let’s begin with Masters and Johnson, the real pioneers in the use of sex surrogates. William Masters came from Ohio, studied medicine at the University of Rochester, and eventually began a research programme in sexual functioning at Washington University school of medicine. Two years later, realising that he needed a female associate, Masters hired Virginia Johnson. She was a Missouri farm girl, a divorcee and mother, who had taken some courses in psychology but had no college degree. They made a perfect investigative team, and as you undoubtedly know, they eventually married each other.

  ‘As Masters and Johnson quickly learned, insight or talk therapy - free association, questions and answers - did not provide enough help for their more desperate patients. What their male patients needed, Masters and Johnson saw, was “someone to hold on to, talk to, work with, learn from, be a part of, and above all else, give to and get from during the sexually dysfunctional male’s acute phase of therapy”. I suppose that was how the idea of the sex surrogate was born in 1957. There were men with grave sexual problems who did not have cooperative female partners, married or unmarried, to come along with them to the therapy, and there were others who had no women friends at all. Were these men to be penalised for not having sex partners willing to join them in their therapy? “These men are societal cripples,” Masters used to say. “If they are not treated it is discrimination of one segment of society over another.” So to treat them Masters and Johnson began to train female partners, sex surrogates, to work with them while under the guidance of the two therapists.

  ‘And the new treatment was extremely successful. In eleven years, Masters and Johnson used sex surrogates to work with forty-one single men. Of these, thirty-two had their sexual problems resolved, fully overcome, through the use of sex

  surrogates. That’s an impressive record, and I can vouch for the means used because, in my previous activity elsewhere, I had one excellent surrogate who worked with five seriously crippled and sexually inadequate patients, and in every case their symptoms and failures were reversed and cured.

  ‘In 1970, as you may have read, Masters and Johnson gave up the use of sex surrogates altogether. It was said that one of their female surrogates, unknown to them, had a husband, and the husband sued Masters and Johnson for alienation of affection. Rather than go to court, and fuel a scandal for the media, Masters and Johnson made a legal settlement out of court and, after that, simply gave up the practice of using surrogates. I trust this will not be my predicament. From what I could learn about each of you, while three of you are divorced, not one of you is presently married. The other thing that disenchanted Masters and Johnson was the realisation that so many surrogates were not only working as surrogates, but were also trying to behave as therapists themselves. Of course, this is something I would never permit.

  At any rate, as you know, sexual inadequacy is the greatest cause for divorce in the United States. William Masters discovered some years ago that of the forty-five million married couples in this country, half of them were sexually incompatible. The figures may vary somewhat today, but you and I know that something should and can be done to make troubled people healthier and happier.’

  Freeberg leaned down to pick an ashtray off the floor, stubbed out his cigarillo and set the ashtray aside. This had served as a punctuation mark. He was ready to enter into a more specific outline of the training.

  ‘Now to your actual training,’ Freeberg resumed. ‘Your internship of six weeks will be under my supervision. You will be given a reading list of professional literature to cover. There will be added sessions in which I will question each of you more intensively on your earlier sexual experience and your responsivity to various adequate mates you’ve been involved with. I will attempt to teach you various counselling skills that you may need with your patients. You will receive thorough descriptions and demonstrations of male and female sexual functioning, to give you physiological knowledge and psychological insights. We will discuss, at some length, especially as it applies to poorly

  performing males, their problem in playing spectator roles to their own performances.

  ‘But most important of all, you will each receive a complete course in surrogate sex therapy, learning and experiencing yourselves what your patients will experience. In fact, right now, without going into detail, I want to describe the steps,
the exercises, you will be sharing with your patients.

  ‘You will be meeting with each patient perhaps three or four times a week, each session loosely limited to two hours. What kind of sexual dysfunctions can you expect to encounter? Sometimes the problems will be simple — a patient with low sexual desire, a person who is naive and socially frightened and isolated, or even a person who is still a virgin. But more commonly, with male patients, you’ll be dealing with a man who has erectile difficulties, one who is primarily impotent. You’ll be dealing with a man who suffers premature ejaculations. You’ll be dealing with a man who is unable to experience sexual pleasure. In the case of a woman patient, you may encounter a female who is nonorgasmic, one who cannot have a climax, even through masturbation. More challenging might be the case of a woman suffering vaginismus, which is a vaginal muscular spasm that makes sexual intercourse difficult or very painful.

  ‘How will you go about curing all these human dysfunctions? It really comes down to teaching a patient to be in touch with his own feelings and to be comfortable with intimacy. The client has come to you to be helped. The purpose of your job will be to develop, nurture, and secure an intimate relationship. It will involve sharing feelings and behaviours. This can be done only on a gradual basis, to remove the patient’s inhibitions and make him more aware of his sexuality and his partner’s sexuality. Many patients are in a hurry to get it over with, to get somewhere immediately. Many of the male patients are secretly saying to themselves, “What the hell, why do I have to go through all this preliminary nonsense? When will we get down to the real business?” But no matter what the client’s urgency, you, the surrogate, will have to remember that it is going to take time, and each patient must absolutely be made to understand that.

  ‘The whole process begins and continues in this manner. A problem patient is referred to me for ultimate treatment. First I see that the patient is examined by an MD to be certain he has no