Idiopathy

Brave.’
    ‘There’s such a taboo, isn’t there?’ said Carol.
    ‘It’s like you can’t even discuss it,’ said Debbie. ‘But he’s really Putting It Out There, which is So Admirable.’
    ‘I just feel really privileged he felt able to open up to me,’ said Claire.
    ‘Mmm,’ said Debbie, Jules and Carol, all of whom, Katherine knew, now hated Claire for being the person Keith had opened up to more than any of them despite all of their overweening efforts to get Keith to open up. Not that they cared about Keith, of course, or that they really desperately wanted to be involved, but, as Debbie would later put it to Katherine, who exactly
did
Claire Demoines think she was, just flouncing in after, what, a week? and getting Keith, who they’d all known much longer, to totally open up to her.
    ‘What am I missing?’ said Katherine brightly, sidling up to Claire Demoines and cocking a glance at the intricacy of her tights. Keith would ladder those in a heartbeat, she thought, with his ghastly fingers.
    ‘Keith’s been seeing someone,’ said Claire.
    ‘Great,’ said Katherine. ‘How lovely. Is it serious?’
    ‘No, not like that. He’s been
undergoing treatment
.’ She invested the term with all the gravity she could muster.
    Katherine did a mental checklist of all the things for which Keith might possibly wish to seek treatment. His toxic personality aside, he was quite prone to recurrent urinary tract infections, around which she supposed it was possible to say there was something of a taboo.
    ‘Right,’ said Katherine. ‘Is it serious?’
    ‘He’s a sex addict,’ said Debbie, unable to contain herself. ‘But now he’s getting some treatment.’
    ‘What does the treatment entail?’ said Katherine. ‘Is it like being a heroin addict? Can you get some sort of sex substitute on prescription?’
    ‘Well, it’s a talking cure,’ said Claire flatly.
    ‘Like a prostitute, you mean,’ said Katherine.
    ‘No, like an analyst.’
    ‘So he’s seeing a shrink because he can’t stop shagging people.’
    ‘His toxic and addictive attitude to sex has been greatly damaging his relationships,’ said Claire.
    ‘Shagging people does that,’ said Katherine.
    By lunchtime the details were all round the office. Keith was undergoing some sort of aversion therapy. He wore a rubber band round his wrist so he could twang it whenever he felt tempted. This would, apparently, transport him back to certain states of aversion and restraint he’d explored under hypnosis. He told Debbie, in the strictest confidence, that he’d looked back on some of the things his addiction had made him do and, although he didn’t want to go into detail for fear of offending Debbie or causing her never to wish to interact with him again, he was not proud of himself. So he had, he explained to Carol in the strictest confidence, taken some of those experiences and had a good hard look at them and then related them to a therapist, who had explained that he had an addiction, and that his addiction was poisoning his life, and that what he needed to do was build meaningful relationships with women without having sex with them. Apparently, he’d explained to Claire in the strictest confidence, his therapist had pointed out that a perfectly natural consequence of building meaningful relationships with women without sleeping with them would be that he would want to sleep with them. This would be partly because he was building a meaningful relationship, which is always arousing, and partly because sex would now feel like something of a taboo, which was, as everyone knew, kind of sexy.
    So, Keith quietly explained to Debbie, Carol, Claire and Dawn, who by now had overcome their disappointment at realising they all actually had Keith’s confidence and tended to talk to him in a little cluster, the point was that he should not, under any circumstances, reduce his contact with women. Indeed, he should increase his contact with women, since that was how he was going to go about building better relationships with them. So really, what he was saying was that he needed the help of the women of the office. Would they, he wondered, could they possibly, find the time to help him practise some meaningful relationships by, say, going to coffee with him, or perhaps just having a spot of lunch or even, as time went on and Keith’s powers of resistance grew stronger, maybe even going to dinner? They could feel perfectly safe, he told them,