3.
 The shrink was a friendly New Age guy in a sunlit room who broke through the barriers of Charlie's loneliness and frustration. Charlie confided: "I think there's more than one way to have sex. Sure, there's screwing, but what's that?" There was, he thought, afraid to mention it, a whole range of spirituality and challenge beyond the mere physical act--but this philistine would not understand.
"Have you ever screwed a girl, Charlie?"
"Well, not exactly."
"Would you enjoy it, do you think?"
"Oh sure," Charlie lied uncertainly.
"It's the real thing," the shrink said.
"Would it help me?" Charlie wondered out loud.
"Sure," the shrink boomed. "Go out and get laid and stop sniffing around women's windows." He pronounced Charlie cured, and the matter was resolved. Charlie stopped prowling around windows. He became a computer programmer, made decent money, and even dated a little. He moved out of his mother's house to an apartment. The relationships were short, always ended by the woman, but Charlie was in fact having sex with them and considered himself to be something of a stud. He wore flashy suits and drove a red Corvette. He wore a gold ring and necklace, leaving his shirt open to expose a mat of curly black hair.
Then disaster struck in the form of a slender secretary and part-time fashion model named Anne Mackovich, with long raven hair and sultry dark eyes in a chiseled face. Charlie bought her flowers, spent a lot of money on her, called her several times a day. Then his demands began to make her uneasy. He wanted to watch through her window while she undressed. She started to do it, perhaps for a joke. She slipped her panties off behind the blinds, with an embarrassed smile, and then fled holding her breasts and squealing to another room. She locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out until he left. It was the last he saw of her. With tremendous pain and restraint, he resisted the urge to watch her from a tree that grew right outside her bedroom window.
Mother died, and Charlie missed her but felt a sense of relief; finally, he did not have her sad, accusing, weary eyes lingering after him anymore. He moved back into the house. He quit his job and took in consulting work. This kept him busy in his home computing center day after day and into the long hours of the night. Gradually, he became more and more isolated. Still hurting from the Anne Mackovich affair, he took long walks in the evenings, looking up at the golden windows of houses containing all sorts of sensual secrets, but he managed to stay out of trouble for a while. Always, he remembered the fear, hurt, and rage in Laurie Tomasini's eyes while she clutched a bed sheet to her meager chest but one unripe, nut-hard breast pointed at him, with its nipple a Horus-eye of eternity.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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