Center. Then the other guests would make observations and suggestions and corroborations, and Mr. Ramsted—who throughout his twenties had been a sex addict, practically living in the Castro’s bathhouses, and who therefore possessed authority beyond that of just being an actuated savant—would provide his own insights into what was wrong with us and how we could improve.
“Jack,” he said, “since this is your first day, why don’t you start our session by telling us the history of your problem?”
“What problem?”
“With sex.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“Let’s not waste everyone’s time, please.”
This echo of my exchange with Ms. Anderson was an effective piece of psychological torture. I slid my chair back to the end of its groove. The faces around the table looked at me impatiently, as though I were an actor who’d come onstage in costume and makeup to say that the evening’s performance would not go on because I didn’t look the part.
“I don’t belong here,” I said.
Addressing the rest of the table as a prosecutor would a jury, Mr. Ramsted said, “Are you saying you’re completely satisfied with your sexual history?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“All of it.”
“Yes.”
“That’s amazing. I’ve met confirmed libertines, people who would rather have sex than bring about world peace, who can’t say as much.”
The walls were a creamy orange and air ducts in the ceiling circulated a cool breeze. The windows’ shades were drawn and I pictured what was happening on the other side of them—nothing. I felt as though I were tumbling down a mountain while the static world spun around me. My lower back was alight with discomfort and I placed my wrists gingerly on the tabletop, where they glowed yellow in the reflected varnish, thinking that if I remained completely still the pain in them would settle down to an acceptable throb.
“What do you want to hear?”
Mr. Ramsted pursed his lips and rubbed his nose, the divot in the bridge of which suggested an old fracture. “I want an explanation of the incredible statement you just made. I want you to confirm that you’ve never made an unwanted pass or offended a partner in bed. That you’ve never had an inappropriate dream about a family member or friend. That you’ve never lusted after someone too young or too old. That you’ve never had erectile dysfunction or gotten an erection when you shouldn’t have. That you don’t fantasize too much or too intensely. And that you think back on all your sexual encounters with approval and sanguinity.”
“I do.”
After a pause Mr. Ramsted said, “Rema, let’s hear about your experiences.”
“From the time I was a kid?” she said.
He rose and began slowly circling the table. “Just be honest. Without honesty no one can hope to grow or improve or come to know the truth.” He looked at me and continued his orbit. “You know what Alexander Pope said: ‘An honest Man’s the noblest work of God.’ And Emily Dickinson wisely wrote: ‘Truth is as old as God, / His twin identity—and will endure as long as He, / A co-eternity …’ And Jesus said, ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ Honesty is the bedrock of Prescription for a Superior Existence, as it is the policy of every right-thinking adult who aspires to succeed in this life and the next.”
Rema then gave a nearly two-hour account of her sexual biography, starting full throttle at age thirteen and accelerating through twenty years of rogue-gallery men and dithyrambic women, in bedrooms and public parks and water closets and interstate train bathrooms, in and out of schools, in and out of jobs, in and out of in and out. It was a smoldering, exhaustive, unpredictable, and inventive monologue that, had it been told breathily instead of with evident pain and shame and self-censure, could have been turned into a podcast sensation. I was enthralled and uncomfortably aroused throughout most of it, and my problems seemed as small as dust mites.
“I have to cut this short,” Mr. Ramsted finally said, giving me another reason to resent him, “and forgo our chance to comment, which is unfortunate because this tragic story puts into stark relief the misery caused by our libidos, in exemplary fashion, but it’s time for lunch. I’d like to thank Rema for her brave, unstinting account of two decades’ worth of mistakes. I asked for honesty and she provided it generously.”
Mihir fell in line beside me on the way to the dining hall and said that despite my obstinate behavior during exercises and counseling, I hadn’t ruined my chances at the Wellness Center. I could yet make up for it. At the serving line as I selected six pieces of pepperoni pizza and a tall fruit juice, he said he understood my attitude, which, although counterproductive and immature, was to be expected at first. Men were brought up to brag about their exploits, not confess them, so we felt cognitive dissonance when learning that our every sexual thought from the moment puberty stretched and dropped our genitals was a debasement of our truest self. It had taken him five days to work up the courage and to develop the perspective to tell his story.
“Is that right?” I said, disappointed by the pizza before even tasting it.
He ladled salad dressing over a plate of tomatoes. “Now I love to tell my story. Every time I do I feel such relief and gratitude that I changed before it was too late. As recently as one month ago I was like a person eating red meat three meals a day without any thought for his cholesterol level, as though I had a good reason to be cavalier about my diet, as though heart attacks were as uncommon as Huntington’s disease! One month. Perhaps you would like to hear my story now.”
We stopped, holding our trays of food, to look around the room for a place to sit.
“I just want to eat.”
“That is not a problem. I will give you the abridged version, not go into the painstaking exact details. You will get more from it than you did from Rema’s, because as a woman her methods and goals of seduction were necessarily different from yours, her experience more complicated and harder to relate to. My story, on the other hand, coming from a man’s perspective, will show that you aren’t alone in your depravity, that sex does not actually prove your power and virility, and that you must step out of the orgasm rut.”
We found an empty table beside a bay window facing the Center entrance, and Mihir shook the salt and pepper dispensers over his plate. “I am married,” he said, “and have cheated on my wife, according to a conservative estimate I made just last Tuesday, more than eight hundred times in the twelve years of our marriage, beginning within twenty-four hours of our wedding vows, when my driver’s daughter took me to the office while her father saw a dentist, and ending the day before I came here. I intimately knew a dozen prostitutes in my neighborhood and fathered seven children out of wedlock, one of whom is the finest junior cricketer in southeast New Delhi. All seemed to be going well, with of course some minor problems, until three weeks ago, when after an afternoon dalliance with two British backpackers I came home from work and found my wife threatening to castrate my eldest son, who shares my name, unless I agreed never to have sex with anyone but her again. You should have seen the cold resolve of this woman, such as she had never shown before, ready to mutilate her own child to restore a fidelity that I considered to be an impossible dream. Well, here, look, this is a picture
